Microsoft Teams update should take all the pain out of PowerPoint presentations

Suffering "death by PowerPoint" may soon be a thing of the past when it comes to video conferencing thanks to a new Microsoft Teams update.

Microsoft has revealed that its online video platform will soon get an upgrade designed at bringing Teams and PowerPoint, with WindowsLatest getting a hands-on with the new offering.

The new PowerPoint Live feature will allow presenters to start presentations directly in a Microsoft Teams meeting without needing to share your screen with the audience, hopefully removing compatability and privacy issues for good.

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PowerPoint Live

PowerPoint Live is available to users in the Office Insider program now (although you'll need a Office 365 E3/A3/E5/A5 or Microsoft 365 for Government license), with a wider rollout anticipated for later this year.

Starting a presentation is as simple as clicking on the new "Present in Teams" button in PowerPoint, allowing the presenter to navigate around their device between different apps and windows without the audience seeing anything.

Presenters will also be able to use a single view to look after their slides, notes and the chat all within a single view.

Accessing the chat window directly alongside the presentation should mean presenters don't miss any urgent questions or prompts, and also allows attendees to click on hyperlinks and videos within the presentation at any point.

How the presentation looks to the audience can also be customized, with speakers available to offer grid review function and see all their audience in one place at once.

The news will be welcome to those set to present in upcoming webinars, and comes shortly after Microsoft Teams made its pitch to become the go-to online meeting platform.

An update in Microsoft's roadmap looks to allow Teams to soon support interactive webinars for people inside and outside of an organization with up to 1,000 attendees. 

The new Microsoft Teams feature will help users support fully interactive webinars from start to finish, offering tools such as custom registration, rich presentation options, host controls such as the ability to disable attendee chat and video, and post-event reporting.

If the webinar ends up topping 1,000 users, Microsoft Teams can switch to instead offering a 10,000-person view-only broadcast experience.

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Via WindowsLatest

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