Conversation

David Chisnall (*Now with 50% more sarcasm!*)

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.

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@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.
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@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.

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

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@john380 PDFs don't support animations.

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@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 )

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@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.

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@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

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