Preview exited, now GA: PowerPoint Presenter View in Teams

[Kaushal Mehta (LYNC)]

Description

Wish you could get some extra help behind the scenes while presenting in a Teams meeting? Check out our new Presenter View! Once you select a PowerPoint file from the Teams Share Tray, Presenter View is opened automatically. You can see the current slide, the slide notes, and a thumbnail strip of all the slides in the deck for easy ad-hoc slide navigation.

This view is completely behind the scenes. It’s private to the presenter in control. Your audience can only see your current slide (highlighted in the big red box), or the slide that they choose to navigate to (if audience navigation is not locked by you).

If you have a co-presenter for the meeting, when that person clicks “Take Control”, Presenter View will be opened for him or her immediately, while you’ll be switched to the normal audience view without the slide notes and the thumbnail strip.

Flighting status

Completed, fully available in R3.6.

How to enable

No setup needed. This is a view private to the presenter in control. Once the feature is available to you, you will see it if sharing a PowerPoint during a Teams meeting. Under Share tray > PowerPoint, choose a file and you will see the slide notes and the thumbnails of all of the slides.

Note: If you need information about enabling the public preview itself, see “Enable the public preview for Teams” below.

 

Microsoft 365 workloads and dependencies

Product, workload, or area	Dependency (Yes/No)	If yes, version requirements and other dependencies
Exchange	No
Sharepoint, files	No
Skype for Business	No
Outlook add-in	No
Azure AD	No
OneDrive	No
Office	No

Supported clients and platforms

Windows 10	macOS	iOS	Android	Linux	Chrome	Firefox	Safari	Edge	Internet Explorer
Yes	Yes	-	-	-	-	-	-	-	-

Known issues

• Control Bar: if the navigation buttons on the Teams U-bar disappears during your sharing, you'll have to leave the meeting and rejoin.
• High Contrast theme: Presenter View UI may not update to high contrast mode, if you change Teams theme to High Contrast during an ongoing sharing session.

Known limitations

• Only available in the “new meeting experience” at the moment (Teams Settings > General > Application)
• Not available in Teams web app yet

Enable your Teams client for the public preview 

1. First, IT admins need to set an update policy that turns on Show preview features. Learn how at Public preview in Microsoft Teams - Microsoft Teams | Microsoft Docs.  
2. Users then choose to join the public preview individually. See Get early access to new Teams features - Office Support (microsoft.com) for instructions. 

Summary of public preview features

For a history of features in the Office and Teams public previews, see Release Notes Current Channel (Preview) - Office release notes | Microsoft Docs.

Send us your feedback 

Got feedback on features in the public preview or other areas of Teams? Let us know straight from Teams via Help > Give feedback.  

Thank you,

Preview Team @Emily Kirby 

Quality & Customer Obsession, Microsoft Teams

[#2]

This is a great feature, but unable to annotate or use laser point just like the presenter view in powerpoint is not good. I tried 3rd screen annotator, doesnt work too. Pls improve 

[#3]

I love this feature! It would be way more better to add laser pointer and other features that we see on PowerPoint presenter view.

[#4]

Great start!  I agree with the others that having the ability to annotate and point is a must.

[#5]

Will this be coming to MTR as well?

[#6]

This states users need to be in the Public Preview to see this feature. I have a number of users seeing this who do not have the public preview turned on. Is this expected behavior?

[#7]

Great to see this in Public Preview now

Look forward to trying it although I don't see as much PP as I used to nowadays, lots of customers asking not to have PP presentations thankfully. Interesting to see the comments about laser pointer function I am guessing it may come at some stage, but great work will make life easier for many ?

I saw a comment about availability for MTR, that is a really interesting idea.

[#8]

My institution's IT has turned on the public preview option per my request as I am very interested in using the new presenter mode in Teams - giving me 2 to 3 less windows to manage while presenting. Despite the public preview being open and I have selected to participate presenter mode does not automatically start - in fact I cannot figure out how to make it start - it just defaults to the standard presentation mode. Any suggestions on why this isn't working? I have followed the instructions below - but still a no go. Please let me know.

Teams Version: You have Microsoft Teams Version 1.4.00.2879 (64-bit). It was last updated on 1/29/21.

[#9]

This is fantastic and was what some of our users were missing, however there seems to be no toggle switch to enable/disable it on a per-presentation basis.

As an education establishment our users are used to a 2160p 75" display and they pack a lot of information into their slides. Using the same slides for remote learning through Teams on a 1080p laptop (or worse) results in the active slide being tiny and the Teacher really struggling to use it. Those that have turned on the public preview (without realising) are now emailing me en mass asking how to turn off presenter mode.

[#10]

@Tony Stevens I completely agree.  having the option to enable/disable this view would be much better.  some of my users(teachers) have animations built into their powerpoints, haven't really ever used presenter view before and are really struggling to use them in meetings now for lessons.

[#11]

How do you disable this feature? It’s not fun while teaching

[#12]

It's on for my users that don't have the Public Preview selected, as result there seems to be no way of turning it off. The complaints are now rolling in 'literally unusable'

The alternative is to show from a Window, but then you lose the ability to monitor the students. Reactions, our staff are now joining the meeting on a 2nd device so they can see student videos and monitor the chat whilst presenting in this way

[#13]

@Tony Stevens Cheers for this. So the work around is share your desktop, and monitor chat etc on another device. Hopefully there will be a solution soon. 

[#14]

Who's bright idea was it to include this feature without a toggle or setting option and did anyone actually QA test this on smaller screens, EG. Laptops.

I now have half my teachers complaining as the slides are too small on their laptops at home and all I can tell them is "Microsoft decided this was a good idea, nothing I can do..."

[#15]

@Kaushal Mehta (LYNC) 

Teams just started doing this today for some reason. How do I STOP it. Why can't I turn it off?

[#16]

I'm having the same problem. Opting in and then out of the Public Preview doesn't turn it off.
Somehow this is rolling out to the non-preview side, so we can't turn it off and it's not possible to disable it for specific PowerPoints, somewhere along the line, someone's made a mistake.

[#17]

@Tony Stevens I raised a ticket with MS on this...the response was basically that’s how it is now, get used to it.

[#18]

@ne8801 I do not have Public Preview on and I am on the right version 1.4.00.2879 (64-bit) it is not deployed, might be a Geo launch thing as normal. I will keep my eyes open and test it during the day and feedback it I get the same issue.

[#19]

This is a great feature, however it is causing massive issues for our teachers. Some of them don't want the presenter view as they can't see the text on the current slide. Please remember that a lot of teachers are using laptops with WXGA screens.

Could we have a toggle switch option that toggles between 'normal' view and presenter view?

Thanks.

[#20]

@Tony Stevens 

I agree with Tony - This is a great feature but would be better if users had the choice of enabling and disabling it. Like others, I have had a few irate messages from my staff asking how it can be disabled.

I've tried to create a UserVoice idea for this, as I couldn't see anything on there. 

https://microsoftteams.uservoice.com/forums/555103-public/suggestions/42654730-toggle-for-presenter-...