PowerPoint has had a 'present in Teams' button, which shows you the presenter display and everyone else the slides, for at least five years. It renders the slides on each client, so works with accessibility, supports zooming, and so on. It is big and right next to the share button.

Yet, even when I was at Microsoft, most people shared PowerPoint presentations by sharing the window. A lot don't even put it in present mode, so you're also seeing a load of UI around the slides.

I still can't quite get over this. For once, some people at MS actually did a good thing and built a really discoverable UI around it (it's a huge button! It's right there!). And still most people don't use it.

@david_chisnall I think part of the problem is few trust that this level of integration between Office and Teams will work, considering the usual issues of each of these components. I'd be esp. concerned about clients running on non-Windows platforms.

@buherator

The way that it's implemented is to run the web version of PowerPoint in a web view in Teams. So it works very well for people on a web browser.

I mostly use it from macOS, but people on Firefox on Linux have no problem viewing the presentations.

@david_chisnall I feel like the standard is to show a PDF of slides. Seems to work better in most environments.

@john380 PDFs don't support animations.

@david_chisnall hot take: if you have animations in your slides, you’ve done something wrong. (point taken, there are reasons of course, but most use of animations is a distraction )

@john380 I strongly disagree. If you're not animating anything, you're not using the medium to communicate effectively. You might be better off with no slides at all.

@david_chisnall I think there’s lots of ways to present. For me, this MIT professor’s class on how to present has been my guide. https://youtu.be/Unzc731iCUY

@david_chisnall “You’re doing it wrong”

#howtosayyouworkedatmicrosoft

I mean, any sensible interface engineer would recognize that two ways of doing one thing shouldn’t lead to two different results.

Apparently the lauded button in PPT does something similar as creating a second display for the presentation. Why doesn’t Teams offer that option instead?

@photovince

Apparently the lauded button in PPT does something similar as creating a second display for the presentation

It does not. It uses the PowerPoint-for-the-web player, embedded in a web view in Teams. This is important because the rendering is local to the viewers. Without that, you are rendering at one resolution, encoding as video, and then presenting at another. This is terrible for text (it will cause aliasing artefacts) and will not work with any of the accessibility tools that other participants in the meeting may be using. With this approach, they can switch to high-contrast mode, can zoom (without artefacts), can use screen readers, and so on. With a separate display, none of this applies.

@david_chisnall
It looks like the file has to be on OneDrive. I think that's enough for people to decide not to go further with the option; they're already spending most of their day telling Windows NOT to save on OneDrive.

@koantig That's probably different for corporate and personal use, though if you're doing PowerPoint presentations over Teams anywhere outside a corporate setting, you've made some very poor life choices. Work stuff should always default to being saved on a networked location, or you lose it when the machine dies.