New Presenter Mode Options for Microsoft Teams

Back when on-site meetings and workshops were the norm, presenting a concept or technology, or delivering training often meant standing in front of a large screen with a PowerPoint deck or shared screen.

Since the pandemic ended face-to-face meetings, many organisations have been using Microsoft Teams to hold virtual meetings. When presenting virtually without being able to share your video feed you’re not able to share your body language and other non-verbal cues that you can do when presenting in person, which can decrease attendee understanding, participation and attention span.

Whilst a lot of new Microsoft Teams features have been released in the last 15 months, it hasn’t been possible to display shared content and the presenters video feed at the same time, until now… A new video overlay option in presenter mode is rolling out and will be available in your tenant shortly.

What does this look like? The images below show presenting a PowerPoint slide and sharing a browser window:

How to I use it? There are two ways to enable presenter mode. The first, when starting sharing, is to click the “Share content” button (Ctrl-Shift-E) and select Standout from the Presenter mode options:

Share content menu

Or, once presenting, select the Standout option from the sharing controls box:

Sharing options box

There are two additional presenter views coming soon: Reporter Mode and Side-by-side Mode. The availability of these modes can be tracked under roadmap feature ID 83371.

This is an extremely useful feature and one I’ll be using when delivering workshops and training sessions to help increase attendee engagement.

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