If you are using Microsoft Teams and often sharing presentations like I do every day, you might have been annoyed at the fact that in you had to choose to either show your face or share your screen.

The problem with having your face in a small box is that your audience is unfortunately missing all the small cues that your face shows while speaking.

At the end of the day we learn from people not from slides, and seeing slides with a voiceover is way less entertaining than seeing people talking over slides.

With a new feature that rolled out in August 2021 Microsoft is giving more options to presenters on how to “show up” on their audiences screens.

And after 18 months of working from home due to the COVID19 pandemic I think it was about time.

(This doesn’t help anyway when your presentation is not well prepared [hint: you can use the Presentation Design Canvas for that] but in case you have done your homework properly then you can definitely start playing with this feature to spice up your performances)

How to use dynamic presenter modes

When you start sharing content (clicking on the icon highlighted in purple in the image below) you will be presented with this view that as of beginning of August includes the “Presenter mode” dialogue. Those are in order the the “Standout mode”, the “Side-by-side mode” and the “Reporter mode”.

Standout mode

In the standout mode you silhouette will appear over the content you are presenting. This means that if you don’t pay attention to what is share on the bottom right corner of the screen you might block the view of the slide behind you.

Luckily you, as the presenter will have a mini-screen that you only will see, and in case that happens you will be able to notice what is visible to the audience and what not.

Side-by-side mode

The side-by-side mode will show a vertical box with your face side-by-side to the slides you share. The positive thing of this mode is that the slides are always fully visible, and you face as well. However, especially on small screens, the size of your slides will be smaller. And in that case you should pay attention to have clear fonts and big text shared (as we suggest to always do in our online course).

Reporter mode

The Reporter mode is a blend of the previous 2. Your audience will see a silhouette on the bottom right corner of the screen (rather than the full camera box) and a box where the content is shared on the left side.

The benefit of this is that both your face and your content will be slightly bigger, though not as big as the full screen.

Changing presenter mode on the fly

If you want to change the presenter mode while presenting the only thing you should do is to hover on the top of your screen and this dialogue will appear giving you the possibility to switch between presenter mode.

When will you get it?

The feature started rolling out in mid-August 2021 and will be rolled out to all the users until mid-September according to Microsoft, so if you have not gotten it yet just wait until mid-September.