There could be a number of reasons you may want to share your computer screen with your team in a meeting. It could be for product demonstrations, training, collaboration, engagement, and many other productive purposes. Thankfully, if you use Microsoft Teams to set up online meetings, then sharing your screen with everyone in the meeting is a single click process.
Setting up a meeting in Microsoft Teams
To get started, open the Microsoft Teams app on your computer, or launch teams.microsoft.com in a web browser and sign with your account.
Click ‘Teams’ on the navigation panel on the left.
Then select a team from the ‘Your teams’ section. If you only have one time, it’ll select automatically when you open the ‘Teams’ menu.
Now start a meeting with the selected team by clicking ‘Meet now’ button at the bottom of the screen on the right pane. It’s one tiny button alongside the media buttons below the ‘Start a new conversation…’ box at the bottom.
Add subject for the meeting and hit the ‘Meet now’ button to initiate a create a meeting room.
Invite people you wish to add to the meeting from the panel on the right of the screen.
Once everyone has joined and you’ve briefed them on the purpose of the meeting. We’ll share the screen so you can collaborate or run a training session with your team.
Sharing screen in a Microsoft Teams Meeting
Sharing your screen in a Microsoft Teams meeting is simple. On the Meeting screen, click the ‘Share’ button on the toolbar.
A sharing menu will open right below the toolbar. You’ll see ‘Desktop’, ‘Windows’, ‘Powerpoint’, ‘Whiteboard’, and a few other options in the sharing menu.
Selecting the ‘Desktop’ option will share your entire computer’s screen with everyone in the meeting. If you’ve multiple displays connected to your computer, they’ll be labelled as ‘Screen #1’, ‘Screen #2’, and so on. You can select which Desktop screen you want to share.
If you only wish to share the screen of a certain program window or a browser tab, then the options under ‘Window’ section is where you should be looking.
Scroll through the list of open windows on your computer in the ‘Window’ section and select the one that you wish to share in the meeting. For browsers, the currently opened tab in the browser will show in the ‘Window’ section.
Note: If you have a different browser tab opened in the browser, then switch to the correct tab in the browser and re-open the share menu to refresh Window options. The same goes for active Windows as well. If you opened a window after opening the ‘Share’ menu in Teams meeting, then you’d have to close and re-open the Share menu to refresh opened Windows on your system.
Selecting a window will immediately open it, and it’ll be highlighted with a thick red border so you know it’s being shared.
Also, your shared screen will appear in your video feed instead of your computer’s camera feed to the other members in the meeting.
If at any point, you want to give control of your screen to another person in the meeting, then hover your mouse cursor to the top of your computer’s screen. A sticky tool bar will show with options to ‘Give control’ to someone else or ‘Stop presenting’ the screen.
The tool bar only appears when you are using the Microsoft Teams app on your computer. If you’re using Teams from a web browser, you won’t see it.
Finally, when you’re done and wish to stop sharing screen, then return to the Teams Meeting window and click on the ‘Stop Sharing’ icon on the tool bar.
Conclusion
Setting up a meeting and sharing screen in Microsoft Teams isn’t as intuitive as it’s on Zoom Meetings. However, Microsoft Teams is a lot of things. And once you know your way into the various options it offers, you would feel more comfortable using it over other screen sharing tools for online meetings.
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