How to Have Multiple Presenters Run Slides in a Teams Meeting
During a Teams meeting, multiple presenters can run and share control of the same PowerPoint presentation! This can be a very handy feature especially when multiple people are presenting the same deck. There are some guidelines to be aware of, so let’s get started.
There are three ways to open a PowerPoint presentation from Teams: Open in Teams, Open in Browser, and Open in Desktop App. For this post, we’re focusing solely on using the “Open in Teams” option (this also works in “Open in Desktop” but controlling the presentation could be tricky).
Opening the presentation in Teams keeps the presentation within the Teams app, making it easier to manage control when multiple presenters are involved and is the best choice when different team members are presenting different sections of a PowerPoint deck. One person runs the slides, and each presenter can take control when it’s their turn to speak, ensuring a smoother flow without having to share and unshare.
Here’s how to do it:
1. Schedule the Meeting: Go to your Teams calendar and create a new meeting (either by clicking the day/time you want within the calendar or simply clicking the new event button in the upper right-hand corner of your calendar tab) and invite all participants. Note: you can also do this through your Outlook calendar, but for our demonstration here we’re going to stay within the Teams environment.
2. Add Co-Organizers:
- Open the meeting options in Teams
- Click on Meeting Options > Roles
- Add co-organizers using the dropdown menu
- Note: You cannot add a participant as a co-organizer until after they have accepted the meeting invite
3. Choose who can present:
- Go to Meeting Options > Roles
- Choose who can present – options include Everyone, People in my org and guests, Specific people, and Only organizers and co-organizers
- If selecting Specific People, add the names of the presenters
- Note: during our testing, we ran into some snags when selecting and trying to add Specific People. We found “Only organizers and co-organizers” worked well consistently.
4. Allow Control Sharing:
- Open the Teams admin center by navigating to https://admin.teams.microsoft.com/ (you need to be an admin of the Team to check this setting)
- Expand Meetings and select Meeting Policies.
- In most cases, click Global (Org-wide default), and scroll down to Content Sharing, then toggle Participants can give or request control to On.
During the Meeting:
1. Share your Screen with the presentation open in show mode.
Note: the “Present in Teams” option for sharing does not allow you to pass control of a presentation during a meeting (hoping Microsoft will add this feature).
2. Make Someone a Presenter:
- Open the participant list by selecting People in the meeting controls.
- Hover over a participant’s name and click More Options > Make a Presenter.
3. Share or Request Control:
- When a presenter is already sharing, they can click Give Control to pass control to another participant.
- Attendees can also click Request Control to ask for control of the presentation.
Once attendees (or co-organizers) have control of the presentation, everyone will see a small bubble with the presenter’s Teams profile photo or initials next to the cursor.
To advance the slides (or go back) the presenter simply needs to click on the right or left side of the slide in their Teams meeting window or use the right and left arrow keys or space bar.
Important Notes:
- In recurring meetings, changes to Meeting Options will apply to all future occurrences.
- Updates made to roles during a meeting only apply to that specific meeting instance.
- If a participant exits and rejoins, they will retain their assigned role unless it’s changed.
- By default, meeting participants can give control of their shared screen to another participant.
We believe the setup outlined here will help ensure your presentation runs smoothly, whether you’re the only one presenting or sharing control with others. Following these steps makes it easy to manage multiple presenters and maintain flow throughout the meeting. Have a great meeting!
-The TLC Creative team