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points by albert_e 1 day ago | 0 comments
Just a datapoint but Microsoft Teams (most commonly paired with users of Powerpoint) has an option to share and present just a slide deck where viewers can tag along the presenter or jump forward and back to view the rest of the deck independently from presenter.

But in quite a few cases presenter would want to control when information is presented/revealed to audience.

[–] nico 1 day ago
The (MS Teams) feature is very cool and potentially useful, but: it only works on certain types of meetings/calls, and the way it’s implemented, people get lost, because they start playing with their slides, and then it’s not clear they can press the “Live” button to sync up again, so then they end up interrupting the speaker to say they are lost, or multiple people will say they are not clear where they are…
[–] hughlilly 1 day ago
“If you don't want people to be able to independently navigate through a PowerPoint file you're sharing, select Private view Hide objects button in the meeting controls.”

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/teams/meetings/share-sli...

[–] nico 1 day ago
I do want people to independently navigate. But also, I'd like to bring them back to the current slide, or somehow highlighting the current slide, essentially making it easy for viewers not to get lost
[–] __float 1 day ago
Including the alt text ("Hide objects button") made this a very confusing quote, until I went to the page.
[–] timothyduong 1 day ago
That is configurable
[–] denismenace 1 day ago
Thanks for the feedback!
[–] WorldMaker 16 hours ago
A related datapoint, which feels like a "know your tools" thing, but PowerPoint itself has always supported a lot of powerful options like Presenter View and "Browsed by an Individual".

If you've got multiple monitors, just present to a different monitor, with or without Presenter View (which shows notes and such) and screen share only the monitor with the slides.

If you're on a single monitor (which ultrawides are making more somewhat common again), you can go to Slide Show > Set Up Slide Show and switch the Presentation Type to "Browsed by an Individual" which keeps the slide show windowed, but hides most controls and focuses just on the slides, then screen share only that window. At the moment PowerPoint still doesn't support Presenter View when running slides this way, possibly because it predates modern ultrawides and people didn't have the screen space before to have multiple such windows open side by side.

("Browsed by an Individual" is also stupidly hard to discover if you have never had reason to "Set Up Slide Show", a dialog somewhat more common in 90s PowerPoint because the flow sometimes was that you would need to "Set Up" before you could F5 launch it. I've seen so many company presentations presented with the full fat PPT normal/editing view window simply because no one knows to look for "Browsed by an Individual" to focus the slides.)

[–] albert_e 2 hours ago
Wow -- never knew about "Bowsed by Individual" - because i never had to "Setup Slide Show"

Thanks for teaching me something!

[–] denismenace 1 day ago
You have the option to limit if viewers can detach.