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About this lesson
Work with meeting participants on a PowerPoint presentation or Excel spreadsheet in Teams.
Exercise files
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5.07 co-author-powerpoint-and-excel-files-live-in-meetings - Exercise.docx43.3 KB 5.07 co-author-powerpoint-and-excel-files-live-in-meetings - Exercise solution.docx
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Quick reference
Co-Author PowerPoint and Excel Files Live in Meetings
Use the new Excel Live and PowerPoint Live feature in Teams meetings.
When to use
We use Excel and PowerPoint live in Teams meetings whenever we want to collaborate on a presentation or spreadsheet with meeting participants.
Instructions
Recently, Microsoft gave us a way of collaborating on PowerPoint presentations and Excel spreadsheets seamlessly with other meeting participants: PowerPoint Live and Excel Live.
Using these tools, we can share a presentation or spreadsheet directly with participants in a meeting and use collaboration and annotation tools to work together on the files.
Start a Teams Meeting
- Open Teams from the App Launcher
- Choose a channel to start a Teams meeting in
- Click the Meet button and choose Meet now
- Change the title of the meeting and adjust other settings as required
- Click Join now
- Invite other participants as required
Share a PowerPoint Presentation with PowerPoint Live
- Click the Share button in the horizontal menu
Prior to the release of PowerPoint Live, we would share a PowerPoint file in a meeting by sharing our desktop. However, there were a few drawbacks to this method.
When you share your desktop, meeting participants can see everything on your desktop. They can see the browser windows and applications you have open. They have the potential to see your email account if you accidentally switch to it and they can see any notifications and pop-ups that appear on your screen.
This has the potential to cause problems or embarrassment.
Using PowerPoint Live stops those issues from arising. The only thing that is shared is the PowerPoint presentation you select. No one sees anything on your desktop and they also do not see any pop-ups or notifications. Even if you switch to another application on your screen, they will still only see the PowerPoint file.
- In the PowerPoint Live section, choose a file to share
The PowerPoint presentation will load into the window and will be viewable by all meeting participants.
In this view, we can see the slide we are currently on, which slides are coming up next, and also any slide notes.
We also have annotation tools underneath the slide.
We can use these tools to annotate the slide. These tools are available for all meeting participants so we can collaborate together.
- Click the three dots to access more options.
- Click Stop Sharing to stop presenting the content
We can use the Excel Live option in exactly the same way as PowerPoint Live.
Hints & tips
- Slide notes are only seen by the person sharing the presentation or spreadsheet.
- 00:04 In one of the most recent updates to Microsoft Teams,
- 00:08 we now have the ability to share Excel or PowerPoint presentations
- 00:13 live in meetings, and being able to do this has many advantages.
- 00:18 So let's fire up Teams.
- 00:20 I'll show you how you can share spreadsheets and presentations with your
- 00:23 coworkers, and then we'll talk through some of the advantages of doing this.
- 00:27 So from the Microsoft homepage, let's fire up Teams.
- 00:31 I'm just going to select it from the left-hand menu.
- 00:34 And then we just need to pick a channel to start our meeting in.
- 00:38 So I'm currently in the sales and marketing general channel.
- 00:41 This is the one we've been working in the last few lessons, so
- 00:44 we might as well stick with this channel.
- 00:47 Notice in the top right-hand corner, we have our Meet button.
- 00:50 Now remember, with this Meet button, if you want to meet now and essentially
- 00:55 have an ad hoc meeting on the fly, then this is the button that you would use.
- 00:59 So let's click on Meet now.
- 01:01 So this is going to open up a new meeting.
- 01:04 We can change the title, so let's just say Team meeting.
- 01:10 We can define if we want our camera turned off or on.
- 01:13 I'm going to leave mine off because you can already see me down here
- 01:16 in the bottom corner of the screen.
- 01:18 We can modify any of our audio settings.
- 01:20 Once we're happy, we simply need to click Join Now.
- 01:23 So Teams is going to go away and connect us to the meeting.
- 01:27 At this stage, I get the opportunity to invite other people to this meeting.
- 01:31 Now, in reality, I would normally do that.
- 01:33 You don't really want to be in a meeting on your own, but for
- 01:36 the sake of the demonstration that I'm going to be doing now,
- 01:39 we don't really need to have any other participants.
- 01:41 So let's just close this down.
- 01:42 So currently if we open up the people panel,
- 01:45 you can see that I am the only participant in this meeting.
- 01:49 Now, it might be that when other people join this meeting, I want to share
- 01:54 an Excel or a PowerPoint presentation with everybody in the meeting.
- 01:58 And I want the other participants to be able to contribute and
- 02:01 make changes to my presentation and my Excel spreadsheet.
- 02:05 Well, that is where Excel Live and PowerPoint Live come into play.
- 02:09 Now, if you already use Teams every single day,
- 02:12 you might be familiar with the Share button just here.
- 02:15 If I hover over it, it says Sharee content.
- 02:18 And when we click on this Share button, we get a whole host of different things that
- 02:22 we can share with other meeting participants.
- 02:26 For example, I can share my screen.
- 02:28 I can share a whiteboard.
- 02:30 I can share files by browsing my OneDrive or browsing my computer.
- 02:35 But we also have two sections in the middle for PowerPoint Live and Excel Live.
- 02:40 Now the presentations and
- 02:41 these spreadsheets that you can see listed out here, those are the files
- 02:46 that are available within the team channel that I started this meeting in.
- 02:50 So all of these files are available in that general channel.
- 02:55 So if I want to share the draft presentation with
- 02:57 all meeting participants, I can click on Draft Presentation and
- 03:01 it's going to load up PowerPoint Live.
- 03:03 You can see here, it's preparing my slide deck for sharing, and there we go.
- 03:08 Now, what I'm seeing here is very similar to using Presenter View in PowerPoint.
- 03:13 I can see the slide that I'm currently on but
- 03:16 I can also see which slides are coming up down the bottom.
- 03:19 And if I've got any notes, so if I have any speaker's notes,
- 03:23 I would see those here as well.
- 03:24 Now the participants in the meeting can't see the notes or any of the slides that
- 03:29 are coming up, they can simply see the main slide that we're currently on.
- 03:34 Notice, underneath, we have some annotation tools so
- 03:36 I could grab the pen and I can make some annotations over here.
- 03:40 I could highlight specific things or
- 03:42 I can use the pointer as a cursor so I can click around.
- 03:47 Notice that I also have the ability to switch to grid view so
- 03:50 we can see more of a slide sort of view for our PowerPoint slides.
- 03:54 Double-click on a slide again just to load that one back up.
- 03:58 And in the middle here, we have three dots which opens up more actions.
- 04:01 We can choose to hide the presenter view.
- 04:04 We can view our slides in high contrast.
- 04:07 And I don't particularly like that view, so let's switch back again.
- 04:11 Or we can choose to translate the slides into different languages.
- 04:15 So lots of different options that we have in here.
- 04:18 Now why would I want to use PowerPoint Live as opposed to simply loading up
- 04:23 the presentation on my desktop and then choosing to share my desktop instead?
- 04:28 Now sharing your desktop is a good idea if during the presentation you need to
- 04:33 switch to other applications.
- 04:35 So if I need to show them something in PowerPoint, and then switch to Excel, and
- 04:39 then switch to my mail account,
- 04:41 then I'm probably going to want to share my desktop.
- 04:43 But if I'm purely just showing them a PowerPoint presentation,
- 04:46 presenting PowerPoint Live is going to be so much better because it means
- 04:50 that they're not going to see anything else that's occurring on my desktop.
- 04:53 And that means they're not going to see things like email pop-ups or
- 04:57 anything else that I have open.
- 04:59 So it gives me a little bit more privacy when I'm sharing because I'm only
- 05:04 sharing PowerPoint.
- 05:06 And of course the other cool feature about this is that
- 05:09 everybody in the meeting can collaborate on this presentation.
- 05:12 They can also use annotation tools to mark up slides.
- 05:15 We can have a discussion in the chat panel about this presentation.
- 05:19 So it really is true collaboration.
- 05:22 When you want to stop sharing,
- 05:23 just click Stop sharing at the top to jump back into the meeting.
- 05:27 And the same thing occurs when we share XL live spreadsheets.
- 05:32 So again, I can choose the spreadsheet that I want to share.
- 05:35 Let's click on Share again.
- 05:37 That's going to load up the Excel file and
- 05:39 again this is the only thing that other meeting participants can see.
- 05:43 And much like when we're collaborating in other apps,
- 05:47 I can see exactly where people are clicked and
- 05:50 I can also see the changes that they're making to the spreadsheet in real time.
- 05:55 So I highly recommend giving PowerPoint Live and
- 05:58 Excel Live a go the next time you need to share a presentation or
- 06:01 a spreadsheet with other meeting participants.
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