Go Full-Screen with PowerPoint and Keynote on Two Screens

PowerPoint and Keynote both offer a two-display setup designed for a computer plus a projector: one screen handles the interactive slideshow; the other offers presenter’s tools, like a timer and preview of the next slide, plus your notes on the slide (Figure 32).

To invoke the slideshow in PowerPoint, click Start from Beginning or any start option on PowerPoint’s toolbar; in Keynote, Click Play or choose Play > Play Slideshow. In both apps, you can move the mouse to reveal some buttons with controls or use keyboard shortcuts for various actions.

In Zoom, you can start sharing a PowerPoint presentation immediately after starting the slideshow. Return to Zoom, select the full-screen slideshow window in macOS or Windows, and return to the presentation app. You can now present.

With Keynote…it’s a little harder. Some special sauce Apple uses for Keynote in macOS requires some significant workarounds: if you’ve started a Keynote slideshow and try to share it in Zoom, Zoom can’t “see” the app window. Because of how Apple made Keynote’s presentation mode neither a regular window nor used standard full-screen mode, when invoked, it’s invisible to Zoom. Instead, you have to use this sequence:

1. Make sure Keynote is prepared to start: you’re on your desired slide.

2. Switch to Zoom, but don’t hide the Keynote app—if you do, Zoom may not present it in its list of available app windows.

3. In Zoom, click Shared Screen and, on the Basic tab, select the Keynote slide screen and click Share. This shares the entire Keynote window, but that’s only for one unguarded moment.

4. Zoom shifts to Keynote as the foreground app. In Keynote, click Play or choose Play > Play Slideshow. Keynote begins the normal dual-screen presentation mode.

If you want to return to Zoom or view other apps in the meantime, press H. When ready to resume advancing slides, use the app switcher in macOS (⌘-Tab) to return to Keynote. It’s that “easy.”

Present in Google Slides

Google Slides works very neatly with operating system and Zoom limitations because it’s browser-based, and that lets you control the windows in a way that native apps sometimes don’t. As usual with Google apps, Chrome is the best choice for having the full set of features available and having them work as expected.

With a free Google account or using a company, academic, or personal paid account, you can navigate to Google Slides and create a deck or import a PowerPoint presentation, which will be converted. (You will almost certainly have to review and tweak a converted set of slides to match your original intent.)

After loading a slide deck, click the Present button in the upper-right corner of the window—don’t use the web app’s regular menus—and a single-window slideshow starts in full-screen mode.

If you instead choose Present > Presenter View, the main browser window shows the interactive slideshow view while remaining in regular display mode—not full screen. Slides opens a second browser window with the presenter view, which is very similar to PowerPoint and Keynote (Figure 33).

Full-screen browser mode with Google Slides works just fine in Windows, but interacts poorly between a browser and Zoom in macOS. In that case, or if you want to have the presenter view available in Windows or macOS, you can share just a portion of your screen, as described in Choose a Desktop Option to Share, earlier, and with more detail for presentations just below in Use a Portion of a Screen for Presentations.

When sharing a portion of screen and Google Slides, you outline the slideshow part of the browser window that’s playing the deck, and optionally place the notes/tools window wherever you like in a single or multiple-display setup outside of that selected screen portion.

Make Your Slideshow Appear in a Window in PowerPoint and Keynote

You might feel locked into a full-screen mode for presentations, whether you’re on a single- or multiple-monitor desktop system. However, both PowerPoint and Keynote offer a way to get the advantage of a regular app window that doesn’t hijack the entire display and use it to share with Zoom (Figure 34).

In PowerPoint under both Windows and macOS, in Slide Show view, click Set Up Slide Show. Select “Browsed by an individual (window)” and click OK. Now, when you start the slideshow, the slides appear in a resizable, floating window (Figure 35).

In mid-2020, Apple released Keynote 10.1 with Play Slideshow in Window. To invoke this new option, choose Play > Play Slideshow in Window. If you think you’ll use it regularly, Control-click the toolbar in Keynote, choose Customize Toolbar, drag Play in Window onto the toolbar, and click Done.

In both apps, you can then use Zoom’s screen sharing to select the presentation window and share it. In this form, the interface elements of the window, such as the title bar, will show in Zoom.

Use a Portion of a Screen for Presentations

For apps that don’t have a presentation mode as such, but can show a preview within the app’s interface, Zoom’s option to select a portion of a screen helps you select just the portion of the app window you want everyone to see and lets you crops out the interface, title bar and other elements.

With these sorts of apps, carefully position the app’s window so that it won’t overlap with any other app you’re using—except Zoom, which automatically hides itself from itself. (You can override that if you want to share the Zoom app to a meeting: see Share Zoom in Zoom.)

Then use the option on Share Screen’s Advanced tab: Portion of Screen. Select that and click Share, and then you can position and resize a green rectangle that shares everything within it to feature just the portion of the app’s window you want to share.

I find this is a great way to use Preview in macOS, which can display PDFs, images, and other kinds of documents. For showing a PDF, I will carefully size and control Preview’s display, typically setting View > Single Page and then option-clicking the green Zoom button in the upper-left corner of the window to size the page to the display. Then I drag the Zoom portion-sharing rectangle over just the visible page.

Present in Keynote with the Mobile Keynote Controller

Keynote’s addition of Play Slideshow in Window gives you an interesting—if slightly complicated—way to have a full set of presenter’s tools and a normal macOS window. Just use Keynote for macOS and the Keynote iOS/iPadOS app’s remote control.

Here’s how to do this:

1. Install Keynote on your iPhone or iPad and on your Mac. Follow Apple’s instructions to pair the Keynote Remote option in the mobile app to your Mac.

2. In Keynote for macOS, open the slide deck you want to present within Zoom, and choose Play > Play Slideshow in Window. Position the window as you like.

3. In Zoom, click Share Screen and then select the Keynote window.

4. Launch Keynote for iOS/iPadOS and tap the Keynote Remote icon. (If you have multiple computers paired, tap Devices, tap the correct Mac, and then tap Done.) You’ll see large Play icon.

5. Tap Play.

6. In the Keynote Remote view, tap the side-by-side slides icon and tap Current and Notes, Next and Notes, or Notes Only to see your notes on the iPhone or iPad (Figure 36). (You can also control text size and invert colors for better legibility.)

You can now use the Keynote app to advance slides or go backwards, as well as pick slides and other options (Figure 37). All the while, you can access Zoom and other apps in macOS without interfering with the Keynote for macOS presentation!

Present with a Single Monitor

In the simplest example, you have joined the Zoom meeting from a single computer and have a single screen on it. You manage what you’re sharing in its own window or portion of a window, while Zoom uses the floating window as with Active Speaker full-screen mode, as shown in Figure 19 in Active Speaker and Figure 38, below.

With a single screen, the floating view of other people sits on top of everything else, including full-screen presentations, allowing you to see participants. Zoom’s sharing bar can give you access to Chat and other features, though some apps may disable a visible pointer, making it effectively impossible to click on things!

For apps that don’t require full-screen mode, you can organize windows so that you have digital notes visible in part of the screen while you present that you can page or scroll through.

You can also help yourself out by printing out your notes and using—I know, I know!—physical pieces of paper, or using an iPad or other device to show your notes.

Single-monitor sharing of presentations can also work quite well with the Zoom beta feature “Slides as Virtual Background,” discussed above, and in Work with Slides as a Virtual Background, as well mmHmm studio, described in Appendix A: Virtual Cameras.

Present with Two Monitors

If one monitor is good, two are better—sort of. I recommend splitting up tasks among screens based on what you need to focus on:

• Put your slides, images, or app where you can see it and easily get to it when you need to view the contents or interact with it.

• Put digital notes where you can easily consult them and glance back and forth from whatever you’re sharing (Figure 39).

• Unless watching participants’ reactions or hand motions is critical, put them in a secondary location that you can look at as needed, but isn’t your main focus.

On a computer with two or more displays, you can set Zoom to work entirely on a single display or to distribute its windows across two monitors. In Settings > General, select or deselect “Use dual monitors.” (Your operating system, not Zoom, determines what your “main” screen is.)

In the single-display mode, you can just drag the Zoom window wherever you like it on any display. If you have slides, notes, and other material on the main display, potentially drag the Zoom window to the secondary monitor.

In dual-monitor mode, Zoom adds a window that during normal conversation shows the latest active speaker in a resizable window on the secondary screen. When you’re sharing the screen, the second window switches to full Active Speaker view: it shows thumbnails videos of all speakers on top of the window (see Active Speaker for more on this view.)

That can be handy or it can be distracting: if your webcam is on top of your primary display, and you’re looking at the secondary one when you speak to people and they see you, it can be disconcerting to them. While presenting, and no one is looking at your video feed, however, it’s not quite as off-putting.

Present with Two People

As I mentioned earlier, having a helper or co-presenter can be very useful when trying to manage slides, notes, other apps or details, and attend to attendees. In some cases, you might push the slide portion entirely to another person!

That person can operate in full-screen mode and rely on your oral instruction to advance slides, while you keep a ready eye on meeting members. It’s a little old school, like a college lecturer pacing a stage as she delivers her talk, occasionally calling out, “next!” You could also keep a direct chat session open with the person managing slides, and type N to them or another signal to make it less audible.

Present with Multiple Devices

Presenting with multiple devices might seem ridiculous at first glance, but it’s an option I strongly suggest for people trying to balance multiple of the considerations I noted earlier at once in a couple of scenarios:

• You want to see and interact with participants while presenting and have access to your notes and potentially other apps.

• You are mixing digital and physical presentation parts, and need to show things in different places or different kinds of things in your set up over the course of the presentation, potentially switching back and forth.

Using multiple devices lets you have enough territory and manage all the elements you need without dealing with the operating system or full-screen constraints—particularly if you want to use Gallery view, which isn’t available when you’re sharing a screen.

One scenario would be to have a laptop and iPad next to a desktop system (Figure 40). Connect to Zoom from all three devices. Have the slides on the desktop, switch into slideshow mode, and share the slides into the Zoom session. On your laptop, use Zoom in Gallery mode. Use the iPad conveniently placed to manage your notes.

If you need to work across space and with physical items, using multiple devices is the ticket. A document camera or a phone or webcam set up in a similar position to capture flat or 3D items beneath it can be a great addition to a presentation. Zoom lets you use screen sharing to select another video source, which gives lets you better control what participants see and allows annotation to mark up the display.

Zoom can also share a USB-attached (Mac, Windows) or AirPlay-streaming (Mac only) iPhone or iPad, but I think it’s often better to have them set up logged into the mobile Zoom app, so that participants can switch to see them or you can spotlight them to make them the fixed active speaker. (See Work with Groups in Meetings for details on using video spotlighting.)

A second or multiple devices can be useful in any situation in which you need to move around and don’t want to have to set up a camera view in each new location (Figure 41).

In a virtual workshop I attended on letterpress printing, the instructor had three Zoom apps running at once:

• A laptop for speaking to attendees and interacting, as well as reading from notes and showing slides

• An iPad mounted in an overhead position above a clear plexiglass sheet, so she could work underneath it, demonstrating layout techniques

• An iPhone on a camera tripod mounted to point at her press, so we could watch her put the layout into the bed of the press and print.

She carried the laptop around for mic input and to switch which video was spotlighted. She muted the audio in and out of the two mobile devices; see the sidebar just below for a warning about that!

In my office setup, I added a mobile swing-arm stand to the wall so that I could clip an iPhone into it and use it both to show overhead views of my 2D laser cutter when demonstrating projects underway on it, and to use the laser cutter’s flat surface—with a piece of white foam core on top—as a document stand (Figure 42).