presentation on teams tips

Vesa Nopanen – My Metaverse Day

Mr. Metaverse welcomes you to my Metaverse day to explore the Future Work.

The Ultimate How To Guide for Presenting Content in Microsoft Teams

Sharing / presenting content in Teams meeting is at the same time simple but is also has some options available that may not be known enough by everyone. This guide lets you get started and dive deeper what happens when you share your window, document or desktop in Microsoft Teams.

This article will be updated when there are new features or based on feedback.

Updated 22.3.2021 Presenter View section.

Community: I am happy to add Mac and iOS screenshots into the article as well if someone is willing to collaborate & provide them. 😎💪

Teams Desktop: sharing a screen (Windows)

Opening the sharing with Microsoft Teams Desktop (in the New Meeting experience mode).

This opens the Share Tray. From it you can choose to start sharing

• Your Desktop (Screen share)
• Specific application (Window)
• Whiteboard application: either Microsoft Whiteboard (natively with Microsoft 365) or available 3rd party Whiteboards
• PowerPoint document

TIP: When you choose to share something using Teams Desktop you can choose to include your computer sounds to meeting. This is a must-have option if you are playing music or video to your participants. You can not toggle this on later – you need to choose this when you start sharing.

When you choose to include computer sound included with the sharing you need to have configured the speaker for computer and Teams meeting to be the same one.

If you have multiple monitors available for your Microsoft Teams you can choose any of those displays.

And you have the sharing open. Shared area is marked with red rectangle around it. You will find the more smaller Teams meeting control window in one of your desktops – and if you have the camera on it will show the video.

But more importantly you can use that small window to control camera, audio or sharing (ending it with one press). Or you can click on the small window (not on meeting toolbar) and it will expand back to the full size.

You can use that same icon to stop sharing in the expanded window.

Tip: If you have two screens available you should consider presenting your PowerPoint presentation so that you share the external screen and project your presentation there (PowerPoint – Slide Show – Monitor). Share that external screen to Teams meeting so you can be sure that whatever you show in that screen it is shown to attendees. Just check that your second screen is not a ultra-wide display or 8k (or preferably even 4k) because the content is going to be tough to read and view by attendees. FullHD screen works the best here.

Tip2: when you are presenting PowerPoint in external screen (and sharing that to Teams meeting) do they advantage of inking and pen if you are using a device with touch screen (like Surface)!

Tip3: if you have an embedded video in your PowerPoint and you use screen/display sharing to present it to the audience: Don’t forget include computer sound with your share!

Teams Desktop: sharing a PowerPoint

You can choose from your recent PowerPoint documents in the list

• A PowerPoint document you opened or edited in Microsoft Teams (in a team you belong to) or in your OneDrive
• Browse for more

This list of sharing PowerPoints is causing often some big questions. PowerPoints will appear in the list once you edit or open the PowerPoint presentation in Teams or OneDrive (there may be some short delay). Generally it applies to the next meeting you join. Make sure you prepare for the meeting by opening the document in advance. Simply uploading a presentation to OneDrive or Teams does not bring it to the list – you need to open/edit it as well.

Browse-option lets you choose a PowerPoint from your OneDrive or from your computer.

What this one lacks is the ability to choose a file from a team you belong to.

TIP: Use OneDrive syncing to have an easy access to files in the most relevant teams you belong to .

Once you are sharing the PowerPoint you can see it in the presenter view mode! This feature is generally available ! This makes it easy to do presentations using Teams – without having to have a PowerPoint desktop app open at the same time. Seems to work only on Teams Desktop with new meeting experience mode at the moment.

The presented area (PowerPoint) is shown surrounded with a red rectangle.

Updated 22.3.2021. There are other controls in this as well for jumping between slides and accessibility controls.

I have a another article diving deeper to Presenter view in here !

NEW: PowerPoint Live has now laser pointer and inking capabilities. Read about them here !

Once the presentation is shared you can move back and forth easily with arrows in the screen.

Note: there is the “eye” icon. If you press that one it locks the PowerPoint for the participants so that they see the same slide as you do: they can not browse the deck on their own. This is called private viewing disable (arrows for other participants will be disabled). Private viewing is enabled on default.

Note: if you are a presenter in the meeting where a PowerPoint is shared to you can take control of the shared PowerPoint to advance slides. This does not ask for any confirmation and the feature is really useful when you have multiple presenters who use the same slide deck. Just be careful that everyone else are not presenters – or they know not to touch it.

You will get a warning that someone has taken the control and can easily take it back.

Whoever is in control of the presentation has also the control to disable/enable private viewing mode. As can be seen in the picture above (with Take control) the eye is missing and arrows are greyed out: this means someone else than you have the control and they have disable the private viewing.

Note: When you share PowerPoint to a meeting this way participants can click links you have in your presentation. Thank you Joe for this reminder!

If you add a online video to your presentation your participants can activate that on their own as well. It is good also to note that if you hit “play” it doesn’t reflect to attendees (=they need to play the video themselves)

Teams Desktop: sharing a Whiteboard

When you choose Microsoft Whiteboard from the Share Tray you are taken directly to the Whiteboard view. Everyone who is in the same organization as you are (the situation in January 2021) can co-author the Whiteboard with you. Once you are done you can Stop presenting (middle top screen) or share something else.

Teams web client: sharing a screen (Microsoft Edge)

Sharing looks a bit different when you are using Teams web client. Sharing is available in (new) Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome browsers. The toolbar is hovering on top of the meeting. From the toolbar you can open the share tray.

When you have the share tray open you can choose to share something of following

• Desktop (Screenshare)
• A specific PowerPoint document
• Whiteboard: either Microsoft Whiteboard or Freehand (3rd party).

• Entire screen
• Application window (a specific application only)
• With Microsoft Edge you have option to choose a selected, specific, tab

When(if) you have multiple monitors it is easiest to just share a one of them: it makes the sharing really simple and easy to manage: anything on that display is shared.

If you don’t have multiple monitors then you might want to just share a single application.

This is useful when you want to show something specific that runs in it’s own application but you can not share anything else on your screen.

Note: Teams is not in the list (not even on blurred ones) and nor is Spotify or ToDo. Not every application can be shared with this.

Note2: you can not share desktop audio to the meeting using Teams web client.

And the last option is to share a selected Edge tab – and if you have multiple Edge profiles open you can share from any of those by clicking the desired Edge active and choosing the tab.

In my example I chose to share one of my screens. You don’t get much feedback – you just click on the screen and hit Share. In one of your screens you will have this toolbar:

You can end sharing using either that toolbar or you can navigate to your web Teams meeting and choose Stop sharing from the toolbar there.

Teams web client: sharing a PowerPoint

This list of sharing PowerPoints is causing often some big questions. PowerPoint presentations will be in the list once you edit or open the PowerPoint presentation in Teams or OneDrive (there may be some short delay). Generally it applies to the next meeting you join. Make sure you prepare for the meeting by opening the document in advance. Simply uploading a presentation to OneDrive or Teams does not bring it to the list – you need to open/edit it as well.

Note: there is the “eye” icon. If you press that one it locks the PowerPoint for the participants so that they see the same slide as you do: they can not browse the deck on their own. This is called private viewing disable. Private viewing is enabled on default.

Whoever is in control of the presentation has also the control to disable/enable private viewing mode.

Teams web client: sharing a Whiteboard

Sharing a Whiteboard is initiated simply by choosing Microsoft Whiteboard (or Freehand or other available 3rd party application) from the share tray.

I have found out that sometimes when you start sharing Microsoft Whiteboard to the meeting using Teams web client it doesn’t do anything. The solution is to try again.

Once the Whiteboard opens you can work on it normally – or choose to open it in the Whiteboard app to have a broader set of tools available.

When you are done you can choose the “Stop presenting” that is hovering on the left bottom area (left of meeting toolbar).

Teams mobile: sharing a screen

Were you aware that you can also share content using your mobile device? I have examples and screenshots using a Android device but these also work with iOS – the user interface might be slightly different.

You initiate the sharing via … menu selection in the mobile to open the list of options

You choose Share and you get to choose what to share

Yes – you can share your mobile device screen to the meeting. This is really useful if you have a application you want to show or train to others.

You may have to adjust settings to turn on allowing Teams to display over other apps.

After that one you may have reshare the screen. And you get the next warning.

And your screen is now shared. You can see the red block that lets you know what are of your mobile device screen has been shared.

And if you pull down notifications area you have option to return to Teams meeting (if you have been using some other app) and there is also the notification that you are sharing your screen.

When you are done sharing you can return to Teams meeting and then choose to Stop presenting.

Teams mobile: sharing a PowerPoint

Sharing a PowerPoint works really well on Teams mobile! It is in fact even better than the version in other clients.

You start by imitating the sharing (as with screen share) and choosing the PowerPoint instead. You get a screen:

From this screen you can choose to browser thought

• A PowerPoint presentation from any Team and channel you belong to!
• Choose a PowerPoint presentation you opened or edited most recently (as you notice compared to other examples that this isn’t 1:1 in sync.. There are differences so that is why I am really happy that you can browse through Teams for sharing)

Once you have selected the PowerPoint to present it is very straight forward from that moment.

Using Teams mobile you can also take control of a PowerPoint someone else is presenting (if you are a presenter in the meeting). This means that you can participate in a multi-presenter meeting quite easily by using just your mobile device and Teams!

You will get a warning before you take the control – in case you pressed Take Control accidentally.

Teams mobile: sharing a photo or video

Follow the steps laid out earlier and instead of screen or PowerPoint you select this time a picture (from device’s picture gallery) or a video (using device’s video camera). Since sharing a picture is very straight forward I use the video instead as example.

You get to see a preview of video first. You can switch to other camera (front/back usually) & position the device properly and once you are ready you just hit Start presenting .

And when you are done you can press on “Stop presenting” to end your video feed.

This video is different from showing your own video using Camera icon the meeting toolbar. Instead of being a attendee video this one is shown in the shared area for every participant in the meeting. This is useful when you have something in the same room/space that you want to share to others in the meeting. Possible use cases: a model on table, physical whiteboard, view from the window, interviewing someone, view in the outside, …

Best practices from my experience

The way I use to share content when in Microsoft Teams meetings is

• I share one of my screens (I have three screens so this is a natural choice for me). This way I know what is being shared all the time since I always share the same screen (the one in the middle, my camera is on top of that screen). Be careful what you drag to the shared screen. This is the way I share my PowerPoint presentations (projecting the presentation to the shared screen)
• If you have a touch-screen device (like Surface-laptop) you should use pen/inking to enhance the presentation experience. This also works when you are sharing the external screen & presenting from touch-screen device: make your presentation stand out!
• Prepare the content you share in advance. Open PowerPoints, apps, browsers etc so you don’t have to spend any time with them when you are live.
• Share your screen early rather than later. This will give you time to reshare.
• When doing a presentation with multiple persons using just the PowerPoint deck share it directly to Teams meeting so you can switch between speakers easily. With the new Presenter view -support this is now a good option.
• Make use of Teams features: Put everyone but real presenters else as attendee so they can’t start sharing their screen accidentally – and you can hard mute them as well. Use meeting options -setting before they join in.
• When people complain they don’t see the share: check that you are actually sharing your screen. If someone is seeing your share and some others not: those who can’t see your share need to leave and rejoin the meeting. Sometimes restarting your sharing can fix that issue too but usually the issue is in the participant end.
• I rarely use application / window -sharing.
• Sharing a video in Teams meeting (or in Live event) is usually ok but you can expect some quality drop – especially if you have a lower bandwidth. Have a backup link to the video available. People seem to struggle more with videos embedded inside a PowerPoint.
• Use Windows Focus Assist and Teams Do Not Disturb mode so you don’t get any unwanted popups on your shared screen. Microsoft Teams will also have a upcoming feature (currently usable in public preview) that let’s users to choose if Teams notifications do their own “toast” (pop-up banner) or do they go directly to Windows notification area (honoring the Focust Assist setting).
• Use Teams Desktop version + new meeting experience when possible. Check that you have the latest version.

More information or different view into this?

Check out Microsoft Support article about Sharing content in Microsoft Teams meetings .

I hope you have enjoyed this guide and it has provided to be useful. Please do drop a comment from below if you have any questions or you want to send me greetings!

Sharing is Caring! #CommunityRocks

Aiheeseen liittyy.

Published by Vesa Nopanen "Mr. Metaverse"

Vesa "Vesku" Nopanen, Principal Consultant and Microsoft MVP (M365 Apps & Services and Mixed Reality) working on Metaverse, AI and Future Work at Sulava. I work, blog and speak about Metaverse, AI, Microsoft Mesh, Virtual & Mixed Reality, The Future of Work, Digital Twins, and other services & platforms in the cloud connecting digital and physical worlds and people together. I am extremely passionate about Metaverse, AI, natural language understanding, Mixed & Virtual Reality and how these technologies, with Microsoft Teams and Microsoft Azure & Cloud, enable to change how people work together. Azure OpenAI Services - yes, I build AI solutions using those and other Azure AI services. I have 30 years of experience in IT business on multiple industries, domains, and roles. View all posts by Vesa Nopanen "Mr. Metaverse"

5 thoughts on “ The Ultimate How To Guide for Presenting Content in Microsoft Teams ”

• Pingback: Dew Drop – January 18, 2021 (#3361) – Morning Dew by Alvin Ashcraft
• Pingback: [m365weekly] #19 – M365 Weekly Newsletter
• Pingback: PowerPoint Live / Presenter View in Microsoft Teams – Vesa Nopanen – My Teams & Microsoft 365 Day
• Pingback: PowerPoint Live / Presenter View in Microsoft Teams - Tech Daily Chronicle
• Pingback: Microsoft Tech News and Product Updates: 4/26/2021 – Mr. Wombat

Leave a comment Cancel reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed .

• Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
• Subscribe Subscribed
• Copy shortlink
• Report this content
• View post in Reader
• Manage subscriptions
• Collapse this bar

Teams Tips: Getting the Most from Teams Presentations and Meetings

• Categories: Teaching and Learning
• Categories: collaboration , meetings , Microsoft Teams , Office 365 , tips

Mastering the many features of Microsoft Teams drives more engaging meetings and presentations. And, understanding meeting functions and roles in Teams Presenter Mode and Meetings is essential for effective presentations or meetings.

Select the following resources that answer common Teams questions focusing on meeting and presentation engagement:

• What is Presenter View and how can it be leveraged for better meetings?
• Can Powerpoint slide shows be displayed during a Teams Presenter Mode  presentation?
• How can content such as videos, Teams Whiteboard, or PowerPoint be shared  in Microsoft Teams meetings?
• How can a presentation be made through Teams Live Events ?
• To better understand the specific roles of the organizer, presenter, and attendee in Teams Meetings, access this chart from Microsoft.

Microsoft Teams Presentation Tips

• January 25, 2024

So, you have a big Microsoft Teams presentation coming up and are looking for some tips to make it sparkle? Then you’ve come to the right place!

Whether you’re in  Marketing ,  Product  or  Sales , you want to engage and inform, (while maybe entertaining at the same time!), we’ll run through some top tips on how to use the Microsoft Teams app to really enhance your presentation while also sharing some great tips in creating an overall engaging presentation for any platform.

How to Prepare an Engaging Presentation?

Prepping for a Teams presentation, or any presentation for that matter, isn’t just about having snazzy slides and a meme thrown in (although, we do love them). A good presentation is a mix of storytelling, design, and a little bit of magic (okay, not real magic, but close enough).

First, you need to know your audience – are they super engaged, nit-picky or just starting at their iPhone wondering when they can grab some lunch? Whoever they are make sure to tailor your content to keep them engaged and interested.

Think of how different people take in information and ensure that you provide a range of materials to engage each one. There’s auditory, visual and kinesthetic.

So for the visual people use visuals that pop off their laptop scream.

For audiophiles make sure that each slide has a succinct and intriguing explanation you can present with it (and please don’t just read the slides!!!!).

Finally for kinaesthetic, well that’s where interactive elements come into play. Engage your kinesthetic audience by incorporating activities where they can participate or contribute. This could be through  live polls,  Q&A sessions, or even quick hands-on exercises if appropriate.

Thankfully Microsoft Teams has features that can facilitate these interactive elements seamlessly.

What Technical Setups are Needed?

The golden rule of presentations is that before you do the presentation check to make sure your tech setup doesn’t betray you. Does your microphone work? Do you have a stable internet connection? Do you know where your slides are? Have you cleared your desktop of anything that shouldn’t be visible? Also, make sure to use a quality webcam, and no, the one from 2005 won’t cut it. Position yourself in a well-lit room, where the only shadow is the looming deadline of your presentation.

How to Troubleshoot Common Issues?

If something can go wrong in your presentation, it probably will – it’s Murphy’s Law. Make sure to prepare for the unexpected and while that doesn’t mean a unicorn charging through your office door, it does mean have a backup plan. Think a pre-recorded version of your presentation, and don’t forget about your mute button. Both savior and gremlin, know where it is and how to use it!

Here are just a few ideas of how you can handle most common technical gLitCh3s that can happen during a presentation.

Internet Connectivity

One of the most common issues is unstable internet connectivity. Always have a wired connection as a backup if you typically use Wi-Fi. This can significantly reduce the chances of connectivity issues. If a wired connection isn’t possible, ensure you are in a location with a strong Wi-Fi signal. Also, consider having a mobile hotspot ready as a last resort. Rule of thumb, don’t be giving presentations when you’re in a tunnel or under the sea.

Audio and Video Quality

Test your microphone and camera before the presentation. Poor audio can derail even the most well-prepared presentation. If you’re using external devices, make sure they’re properly connected and configured. For video,  check the lighting  and camera angle in advance. If possible, have a backup microphone and camera.

Software Glitches

Microsoft Teams, like any software, can experience glitches. Familiarize yourself with basic troubleshooting steps like restarting the app or your computer. Ensure your Teams app is updated to the latest version before starting. Sometimes there will be things you cannot control, but make sure that it’s a glitch and not a user error (ahem, that would never happen… honest) in the first instance.

Presentation File Issues

Nothing worse than the document you have ready to show everybody doesn’t open or is telling you to download some sort of brand new PDF viewer. Try and have multiple formats of your presentation ready. Apart from the primary format, save a PDF version or have your slides uploaded to a cloud storage platform for quick access. This helps if there’s an issue with the original file.

Backup Plan for Power Outages

In case of a power outage, ensure your laptop is fully charged. Additionally, having a power bank can be a lifesaver, especially if you’re presenting from a tablet or smartphone. While this may seem wild if you’re working from your home office, for those  digital nomads  and those who like to work on the go this can happen more often than you think!

Handling Interruptions Gracefully

Working remotely unexpected interruptions can happen – a sudden noise, someone walking into the room, etc. Plan how to handle these situations gracefully without getting flustered. A simple, “Excuse me for a moment,” can suffice while you manage the interruption. And most people don’t mind a cameo by a cute dog or cat during any presentation.

Managing Participant Issues

Sometimes, participants might face issues like not being able to hear you or see your screen. Prepare a  quick troubleshooting guide  to assist them, like checking their volume settings or ensuring they’re viewing the correct screen in Teams.

How to Keep Your Audience Engaged?

Engaging your audience in a virtual presentation is like trying to get a cat’s attention – tricky but not impossible. Ask questions, use polls, and throw in a joke or two (keep it work-appropriate, though). Make them feel involved, like they’re part of the presentation, not just onlookers. Eye contact is key – look into the camera, not at the screen. It creates a connection, even through the digital abyss.

What Features of Microsoft Teams Enhance Presentations?

Even though you’ll be doing most of the heavy lifting in your presentation Microsoft Teams does have your back with a lot of built-in features that can enhance presentations, making them more interactive, engaging, and effective.

Screen Sharing and Whiteboard

Sometimes you just have to show people what your talking about. With its screen-sharing feature, you can quite literally share your entire screen or specific applications, ensuring clarity. The native digital whiteboard is an excellent tool for brainstorming, illustrating complex concepts, drawing terrible cat pictures and generally engaging the audience in real-time collaboration.

Live Reactions and Polls

Teams enables live reactions from participants, allowing them to express feedback instantly. Polls can be used to gather real-time responses, making the presentation interactive and gauging audience understanding.

Breakout Rooms

For workshops or training sessions, breakout rooms can divide participants into smaller groups for discussions or activities, fostering collaboration and deeper engagement with the content.

Custom Backgrounds and Visual Effects

The ability to customize backgrounds adds a professional touch while keeping the focus on the presenter. Visual effects can emphasize key points and make the presentation more visually appealing. Find out more in our  fun article about changing backgrounds !

Meeting Recording

Teams allows recording of meetings and presentations, enabling participants to revisit the content later, which is particularly useful for detailed or technical presentations. However it’s only available on the paid-for version of Teams. Thankfully there are other options for this, such as tl;dv, which have more functionality, search functions and better collaboration opportunities… why not click the below and give it a try for FREE.

These features transform presentations from one-way communication into dynamic, interactive sessions. By leveraging these tools, presenters can create an engaging and memorable experience for their audience.

So you are now well on your way to becoming a Teams presentation guru. Confidence is key, preparation is paramount, and a little humor goes a long way.

How to master MEDDPICC / MEDDICC / MEDDIC sales processes (including GPT prompts)

Subscribe and stay up to date with the latest tips and news on Meetings, Sales, Customer Success, Productivity, and Work Culture.

Get started with tl;dv today

Google Meet

Microsoft Teams

Meeting Assistants

Subscribe to our Blogs

• Online Degree Explore Bachelor’s & Master’s degrees
• MasterTrack™ Earn credit towards a Master’s degree
• University Certificates Advance your career with graduate-level learning
• Top Courses
• Join for Free

What Are Effective Presentation Skills (and How to Improve Them)

Presentation skills are essential for your personal and professional life. Learn about effective presentations and how to boost your presenting techniques.

At least seven out of 10 Americans agree that presentation skills are essential for a successful career [ 1 ]. Although it might be tempting to think that these are skills reserved for people interested in public speaking roles, they're critical in a diverse range of jobs. For example, you might need to brief your supervisor on research results.

Presentation skills are also essential in other scenarios, including working with a team and explaining your thought process, walking clients through project ideas and timelines, and highlighting your strengths and achievements to your manager during performance reviews.

Whatever the scenario, you have very little time to capture your audience’s attention and get your point across when presenting information—about three seconds, according to research [ 2 ]. Effective presentation skills help you get your point across and connect with the people you’re communicating with, which is why nearly every employer requires them.

Understanding what presentation skills are is only half the battle. Honing your presenting techniques is essential for mastering presentations of all kinds and in all settings.

What are presentation skills?

Presentation skills are the abilities and qualities necessary for creating and delivering a compelling presentation that effectively communicates information and ideas. They encompass what you say, how you structure it, and the materials you include to support what you say, such as slides, videos, or images.

You'll make presentations at various times in your life. Examples include:

Making speeches at a wedding, conference, or another event

Making a toast at a dinner or event

Explaining projects to a team 

Delivering results and findings to management teams

Teaching people specific methods or information

Proposing a vote at community group meetings

Pitching a new idea or business to potential partners or investors

Why are presentation skills important? 

Delivering effective presentations is critical in your professional and personal life. You’ll need to hone your presentation skills in various areas, such as when giving a speech, convincing your partner to make a substantial purchase, and talking to friends and family about an important situation.

No matter if you’re using them in a personal or professional setting, these are the skills that make it easier and more effective to convey your ideas, convince or persuade others, and experience success. A few of the benefits that often accompany improving your presentation skills include:

Enriched written and verbal communication skills

Enhanced confidence and self-image

Boosted critical thinking and problem-solving capabilities

Better motivational techniques

Increased leadership skills

Expanded time management, negotiation, and creativity

The better your presenting techniques, the more engaging your presentations will be. You could also have greater opportunities to make positive impacts in business and other areas of your life.

Effective presentation skills

Imagine yourself in the audience at a TED Talk or sitting with your coworkers at a big meeting held by your employer. What would you be looking for in how they deliver their message? What would make you feel engaged?

These are a few questions to ask yourself as you review this list of some of the most effective presentation skills.

Verbal communication

How you use language and deliver messages play essential roles in how your audience will receive your presentation. Speak clearly and confidently, projecting your voice enough to ensure everyone can hear. Think before you speak, pausing when necessary and tailoring the way you talk to resonate with your particular audience.

Body language

Body language combines various critical elements, including posture, gestures, eye contact, expressions, and position in front of the audience. Body language is one of the elements that can instantly transform a presentation that would otherwise be dull into one that's dynamic and interesting.

Voice projection

The ability to project your voice improves your presentation by allowing your audience to hear what you're saying. It also increases your confidence to help settle any lingering nerves while also making your message more engaging. To project your voice, stand comfortably with your shoulders back. Take deep breaths to power your speaking voice and ensure you enunciate every syllable you speak.

How you present yourself plays a role in your body language and ability to project your voice. It also sets the tone for the presentation. Avoid slouching or looking overly tense. Instead, remain open, upright, and adaptable while taking the formality of the occasion into account.

Storytelling

Incorporating storytelling into a presentation is an effective strategy used by many powerful public speakers. It has the power to bring your subject to life and pique the audience’s curiosity. Don’t be afraid to tell a personal story, slowly building up suspense or adding a dramatic moment. And, of course, be sure to end with a positive takeaway to drive your point home.

Active listening

Active listening is a valuable skill all on its own. When you understand and thoughtfully respond to what you hear—whether it's in a conversation or during a presentation—you’ll likely deepen your personal relationships and actively engage audiences during a presentation. As part of your presentation skill set, it helps catch and maintain the audience’s attention, helping them remain focused while minimizing passive response, ensuring the message is delivered correctly, and encouraging a call to action.

Stage presence

During a presentation, projecting confidence can help keep your audience engaged. Stage presence can help you connect with your audience and encourage them to want to watch you. To improve your presence, try amping up your normal demeanor by infusing it with a bit of enthusiasm. Project confidence and keep your information interesting.

Watch your audience as you’re presenting. If you’re holding their attention, it likely means you’re connecting well with them.

Self-awareness

Monitoring your own emotions and reactions will allow you to react well in various situations. It helps you remain personable throughout your presentation and handle feedback well. Self-awareness can help soothe nervousness during presentations, allowing you to perform more effectively.

Writing skills

Writing is a form of presentation. Sharp writing skills can help you master your presentation’s outline to ensure you stay on message and remain clear about your objectives from the beginning until the end. It’s also helpful to have strong writing abilities for creating compelling slides and other visual aids.

Understanding an audience

When you understand your audience's needs and interests, you can design your presentation around them. In turn, you'll deliver maximum value to them and enhance your ability to make your message easy to understand.

Learn more about presentation skills from industry experts at SAP:

How to improve presentation skills

There’s an art to public speaking. Just like any other type of art, this is one that requires practice. Improving your presentation skills will help reduce miscommunications, enhance your time management capabilities, and boost your leadership skills. Here are some ways you can improve these skills:

Work on self-confidence.

When you’re confident, you naturally speak more clearly and with more authority. Taking the time to prepare your presentation with a strong opening and compelling visual aids can help you feel more confident. Other ways to improve your self-confidence include practicing positive self-talk, surrounding yourself with positive people, and avoiding comparing yourself (or your presentation) to others.

Develop strategies for overcoming fear.

Many people are nervous or fearful before giving a presentation. A bad memory of a past performance or insufficient self-confidence can contribute to fear and anxiety. Having a few go-to strategies like deep breathing, practicing your presentation, and grounding can help you transform that fear into extra energy to put into your stage presence.

Learn grounding techniques.

Grounding is any type of technique that helps you steer your focus away from distressing thoughts and keeps you connected with your present self. To ground yourself, stand with your feet shoulder-width apart and imagine you’re a large, mature tree with roots extending deep into the earth—like the tree, you can become unshakable.

Learn how to use presentation tools.

Visual aids and other technical support can transform an otherwise good presentation into a wow-worthy one. A few popular presentation tools include:

Canva: Provides easy-to-design templates you can customize

Powtoon: Animation software that makes video creation fast and easy

PowerPoint: Microsoft's iconic program popular for dynamic marketing and sales presentations

Practice breathing techniques.

Breathing techniques can help quell anxiety, making it easier to shake off pre-presentation jitters and nerves. It also helps relax your muscles and get more oxygen to your brain.  For some pre-presentation calmness, you can take deep breaths, slowly inhaling through your nose and exhaling through your mouth.

While presenting, breathe in through your mouth with the back of your tongue relaxed so your audience doesn't hear a gasping sound. Speak on your exhalation, maintaining a smooth voice.

Gain experience.

The more you practice, the better you’ll become. The more you doanything, the more comfortable you’ll feel engaging in that activity. Presentations are no different. Repeatedly practicing your own presentation also offers the opportunity to get feedback from other people and tweak your style and content as needed.

Tips to help you ace your presentation

Your presentation isn’t about you; it’s about the material you’re presenting. Sometimes, reminding yourself of this ahead of taking center stage can help take you out of your head, allowing you to connect effectively with your audience. The following are some of the many actions you can take on the day of your presentation.

Arrive early.

Since you may have a bit of presentation-related anxiety, it’s important to avoid adding travel stress. Give yourself an abundance of time to arrive at your destination, and take into account heavy traffic and other unforeseen events. By arriving early, you also give yourself time to meet with any on-site technicians, test your equipment, and connect with people ahead of the presentation.

Become familiar with the layout of the room.

Arriving early also gives you time to assess the room and figure out where you want to stand. Experiment with the acoustics to determine how loudly you need to project your voice, and test your equipment to make sure everything connects and appears properly with the available setup. This is an excellent opportunity to work out any last-minute concerns and move around to familiarize yourself with the setting for improved stage presence.

Listen to presenters ahead of you.

When you watch others present, you'll get a feel for the room's acoustics and lighting. You can also listen for any data that’s relevant to your presentation and revisit it during your presentation—this can make the presentation more interactive and engaging.

Use note cards.

Writing yourself a script could provide you with more comfort. To prevent sounding too robotic or disengaged, only include talking points in your note cards in case you get off track. Using note cards can help keep your presentation organized while sounding more authentic to your audience.

Learn to deliver clear and confident presentations with Dynamic Public Speaking from the University of Washington. Build confidence, develop new delivery techniques, and practice strategies for crafting compelling presentations for different purposes, occasions, and audiences.

Article sources

Forbes. “ New Survey: 70% Say Presentation Skills are Critical for Career Success , https://www.forbes.com/sites/carminegallo/2014/09/25/new-survey-70-percent-say-presentation-skills-critical-for-career-success/?sh=619f3ff78890.” Accessed December 7, 2022.

Beautiful.ai. “ 15 Presentation and Public Speaking Stats You Need to Know , https://www.beautiful.ai/blog/15-presentation-and-public-speaking-stats-you-need-to-know. Accessed December 7, 2022.

Keep reading

Coursera staff.

Editorial Team

Coursera’s editorial team is comprised of highly experienced professional editors, writers, and fact...

This content has been made available for informational purposes only. Learners are advised to conduct additional research to ensure that courses and other credentials pursued meet their personal, professional, and financial goals.

How to Present PowerPoint in Teams

If you’re looking to deliver a winning PowerPoint presentation, you need to understand how to present PowerPoint in Teams. Whether you’re working remotely or simply want to take advantage of Teams’ collaborative tools, presenting in Teams is a great option for sharing your insights with your audience. Here’s everything you need to know to get started:

Table of Contents

The Benefits of Presenting PowerPoint in Teams

One of the biggest advantages of using Teams to present your PowerPoint is the level of collaboration that is possible. With Teams, you can easily invite team members to contribute to your presentation, even in real-time. This can be especially helpful when working on complex data-driven presentations that require a team effort. Additionally, Teams ensures that everyone can view your presentation from their own device, making it accessible to team members working remotely or on the go.

Another benefit of presenting PowerPoint in Teams is the ability to record the presentation. This feature is particularly useful for team members who are unable to attend the live presentation or for those who want to review the presentation at a later time. The recorded presentation can also be shared with others who were not part of the original team, allowing for wider dissemination of information. Furthermore, Teams provides a chat feature that allows team members to ask questions or provide feedback during the presentation, making it a more interactive and engaging experience for everyone involved.

Step-by-Step Guide to Presenting PowerPoint in Teams

Here’s a step-by-step guide to presenting your PowerPoint in Teams:

• Open the PowerPoint file you want to present.
• Click on the “Present Online” button in the “Share” tab.
• Select “Microsoft Teams” from the dropdown menu.
• Choose whether you want to present in a new meeting or an existing one.
• Click “Connect” to start sharing your PowerPoint presentation in Teams.

Presenting your PowerPoint in Teams can be a great way to collaborate with your team members and share your ideas. However, it’s important to keep in mind that not all features of PowerPoint may be available in Teams. For example, some animations or transitions may not work as expected.

Another important thing to consider is your internet connection. If your internet connection is slow or unstable, it may affect the quality of your presentation. To avoid any issues, it’s recommended to test your internet connection before presenting and to have a backup plan in case of any technical difficulties.

How to Share Your Screen in Teams

If you need to share your screen while you’re presenting, Teams makes it easy. Here’s what to do:

• Click on the “Share Screen” button in the Teams meeting controls.
• Select the screen or monitor you want to share.
• Click “Share” to start sharing your screen with your team.

Sharing your screen in Teams can be a great way to collaborate with your team, whether you’re working on a project together or presenting a new idea. It allows everyone to see what you’re working on in real-time, making it easier to provide feedback and make changes on the fly.

One thing to keep in mind when sharing your screen is to make sure you’re only sharing what you intend to share. Be mindful of any sensitive information that may be visible on your screen, such as personal emails or confidential documents. You can also choose to share only a specific window or application, rather than your entire screen, to ensure that only the necessary information is being shared.

Tips for Delivering Effective PowerPoint Presentations in Teams

Delivering a successful PowerPoint presentation in Teams requires more than just technical knowledge. Here are a few tips to help you deliver a knockout presentation:

• Practice your presentation in advance to ensure everything runs smoothly.
• Be mindful of how you’re presenting on camera, particularly if it’s your first time presenting virtually.
• Engage with your audience by asking questions and facilitating discussion through Teams’ chat or voice channels.

Another important tip for delivering effective PowerPoint presentations in Teams is to keep your slides simple and easy to read. Avoid cluttering your slides with too much text or graphics, as this can distract your audience and make it difficult for them to follow along. Instead, use clear and concise language, and include only the most important information on each slide. Additionally, be sure to use a consistent design throughout your presentation, with a clear color scheme and font style. This will help to create a professional and polished look for your presentation, and make it easier for your audience to focus on your message.

Best Practices for Collaborating on PowerPoint Presentations in Teams

Collaborating on PowerPoint presentations can be a challenge, but Teams offers some useful tools to help team members work together successfully. Here are a few best practices to follow:

• Establish clear communication channels and expectations for your team members.
• Set deadlines for different components of your presentation to ensure everyone stays on track.
• Use Teams’ chat and meeting functionalities to stay connected throughout the presentation process.

Another important best practice for collaborating on PowerPoint presentations in Teams is to assign specific roles and responsibilities to each team member. This ensures that everyone knows what they are responsible for and can focus on their assigned tasks. Additionally, it can be helpful to create a shared folder or document library in Teams where all team members can access and edit the presentation. This eliminates the need for emailing different versions of the presentation and ensures that everyone is working on the most up-to-date version. By following these best practices, your team can collaborate effectively and create a successful PowerPoint presentation in Teams.

How to Use Annotations and Laser Pointers in Teams Presentations

If you want to highlight specific points on your presentation, you can use the annotation tools that are available in Teams. Here’s what you need to know:

• While your presentation is open, click on “Show Stage” to reveal the annotation tools.
• From here, you can use the laser pointer to point out important information or draw attention to specific sections of your slides.
• You can also draw on your slides using the pencil or highlighter tools.

Another useful feature of the annotation tools in Teams is the ability to change the color and thickness of your annotations. This can help you to differentiate between different types of annotations or to make your annotations more visible on the slide.

It’s also worth noting that if you’re presenting to a large group, you may want to consider using a separate laser pointer device rather than relying on the built-in laser pointer in Teams. This can help to ensure that your audience can see your pointer clearly, even if they’re sitting at the back of the room.

Troubleshooting Common Issues When Presenting PowerPoint in Teams

Even with careful preparation, technical issues can still arise when presenting in Teams. Here are some common issues to look out for:

• Slow internet speeds can cause lagging or disconnections in your presentation.
• Problems with your Teams settings can prevent attendees from seeing or hearing your presentation.
• The wrong display settings can cause the presentation to display incorrectly.

If you encounter any of these issues, take a break and ensure you are following the correct steps for presenting in Teams. If necessary, consult with an IT professional to troubleshoot.

Another common issue that can occur when presenting PowerPoint in Teams is audio or video quality problems. This can be caused by a variety of factors, such as poor microphone or camera quality, background noise, or incorrect audio or video settings. To avoid these issues, make sure to test your equipment and settings before the presentation, and try to minimize any potential sources of background noise. If you do encounter audio or video quality problems during the presentation, try adjusting your settings or moving to a quieter location if possible.

Integrating Video and Audio into Your PowerPoint Presentation in Teams

If you need to add audio or video to your PowerPoint presentation in Teams, here’s what to do:

• From the “Insert” tab, select “Audio” or “Video.”
• Choose whether you want to insert a file from your computer or an online video.
• Follow any prompts or instructions to insert the audio or video into your presentation.

It’s important to note that when adding audio or video to your PowerPoint presentation in Teams, you should always test it out beforehand to ensure that it works properly. Additionally, if you’re presenting to a large group, it’s a good idea to have a backup plan in case there are any technical difficulties. This could include having a separate device with the audio or video file ready to play, or having a printed copy of the presentation as a backup.

Customizing Your Presentation Layout for Maximum Impact in Teams

To ensure your presentation has maximum impact in Teams, you may want to consider customizing your layout. Here are a few options to explore:

• Use a theme that aligns with your team or your brand.
• Be mindful of how you’re laying out your information on each slide to ensure it is clear and easy to understand.
• Include high-quality images and graphics to make your presentation visually engaging.

How to Record Your PowerPoint Presentation in Teams for Future Use

If you want to record your PowerPoint presentation in Teams for future use, follow these steps:

• Before presenting, click on the “More options” button (three dots) in the Teams meeting controls.
• Select “Start recording.”
• Start your presentation as usual.
• When you’re finished, navigate back to the Teams meeting controls.
• Select “Stop recording.”
• Your recording will be saved automatically.

Collaborating with Remote Team Members on a PowerPoint Presentation in Teams

If you’re working with remote team members, collaborating on a PowerPoint presentation in Teams can be an effective way to stay connected. Here are some best practices to consider:

• Use Teams’ chat and call functionality to stay in touch throughout the presentation process.
• Be clear about expectations and deadlines to ensure everyone is on the same page.
• Create a shared space for files and documents to ensure easy access for each team member.

How to Use the Whiteboard Feature During a PowerPoint Presentation in Teams

The whiteboard feature in Teams is a great way to collaborate in a presentation in real-time. Here’s how to use it:

• Click on the “Whiteboard” button in the Teams meeting controls.
• From here, you can draw and write on the screen as you would a physical whiteboard.
• Invite team members to contribute or use the chat bar to facilitate discussion.

With these tips and tools, you can seamlessly present your PowerPoint presentation in Teams and enjoy all the benefits of remote collaboration. Take some time to practice and familiarize yourself with the Teams platform to ensure your presentation runs smoothly.

By humans, for humans - Best rated articles:

Excel report templates: build better reports faster, top 9 power bi dashboard examples, excel waterfall charts: how to create one that doesn't suck, beyond ai - discover our handpicked bi resources.

Explore Zebra BI's expert-selected resources combining technology and insight for practical, in-depth BI strategies.

We’ve been experimenting with AI-generated content, and sometimes it gets carried away. Give us a feedback and help us learn and improve! 🤍

Note: This is an experimental AI-generated article. Your help is welcome. Share your feedback with us and help us improve.

• Generative AI
• Office Suites
• Collaboration Software
• Productivity Software
• Augmented Reality
• Emerging Technology
• Remote Work
• Artificial Intelligence
• Operating Systems
• IT Leadership
• IT Management
• IT Operations
• Cloud Computing
• Computers and Peripherals
• Data Center
• Enterprise Applications
• Vendors and Providers
• Enterprise Buyer’s Guides
• United States
• Netherlands
• United Kingdom
• New Zealand
• Newsletters
• Foundry Careers
• Terms of Service
• Privacy Policy
• Cookie Policy
• Copyright Notice
• Member Preferences
• About AdChoices
• E-commerce Affiliate Relationships
• Your California Privacy Rights

Our Network

• Network World

28 power user tips for Microsoft Teams

Take collaboration to the next level with these teams tips and tricks..

Microsoft Teams is a powerful corporate chat, collaboration, and meeting application. Because it’s included with most Microsoft 365 and Office 365 business and enterprise subscriptions, many companies already use it as a primary way to keep their workforce — both in-office and remote — in touch.

Teams lets you set up multiple channels (discussion areas) for your team, share and store files, and conduct voice and video meetings. As part of Microsoft 365/Office 365, Teams integrates well with the family of Microsoft business apps and services that encompasses Excel, OneDrive, OneNote, Outlook, Planner, PowerPoint, SharePoint, and Word.

To get started using Teams in a business setting, see our Microsoft Teams cheat sheet . After you’ve gotten a handle on the basics, try the tips in this guide to get more out of this powerful collaboration tool. ( Here’s a look at how it compares to rivals .)

This guide focuses on the Teams desktop app for Windows or Mac under a business subscription. There are also Teams mobile apps for Android and iOS, as well as a web app. But these apps emphasize chatting without a lot of the advanced features of their desktop counterparts. Likewise, a consumer version of Teams is available, but it doesn’t include all the features for business users covered in this story.

Also note that although this guide includes a few tips for video meetings, it focuses mainly on the chat and group collaboration features of Teams. To learn more about videoconferencing in Teams, see “ 11 best practices for Microsoft Teams video meetings ” and “ The 10 best new Microsoft Teams meeting features .”

Take control of the interface

1. organize your teams and channels..

In the sidebar at the left side of the app, click the Teams icon to open the Teams pane. You’ll see the teams that you’re a member of, with one or more channels below each team name.

By default, teams (and the channels below each team) appear in the order that you joined or created them. But as you use Microsoft Teams over time in your daily work, some teams and channels will become more important to you than others — and not necessarily in the order that the Teams app places them.

Pinning a channel moves it toward the top of the Teams pane for easy access. To do this, click the three-dot ( More options ) icon to the right of the channel name and select Pin from the menu that opens. (Do this process again to unpin a channel.)

Pinning channels to the top of the Teams pane makes them more easily accessible. (Click image to enlarge it.)

To change the order of your pinned channels, click-and-hold a channel name and drag it up or down to where you’d like it to be in the list of pinned channels.

You can also do this to change the order of your teams: Click-and-hold a team name and drag it up or down to where you’d like to move it on the list.

2. Hide low-priority channels or teams.

You can tidy up your Teams workspace by hiding channels or teams that are not important to your work at the moment.

To hide a channel or team, click the three-dot icon to the right of its name, then click Hide from the menu that opens. (Note that you cannot hide the General channel for any team.)

To unhide a channel, look at the list of channels under a team name. At the end of this list is a link saying how many hidden channels that this team has; click this link to open a menu revealing the hidden channels. Move the pointer over the name of the channel that you want to unhide, and click the Show icon to the right.

To unhide a team, look or scroll down to the end of the list of your teams, where you’ll see a Hidden teams link. Click this to open the list of hidden teams. Click the three-dot icon to the right of a hidden team, then click Show at the top of the menu that opens.

3. Quickly find conversations that you’re a member of or messages that you’re tagged in.

In Teams, it’s easy to see all the conversations (message threads within a channel) and messages that you’re a part of at a glance.

At the top of the left sidebar, click the Activity icon. This opens the Feed pane to the right. To the right of the Feed pane title bar, right-click the Filter icon (three horizontal lines in a funnel shape) and select @ Mentions from the menu that opens. (Or type /mentions into the search bar at the top of the Teams app.) Conversations that you’re a member of, and messages that you’re tagged in, will be listed in the Feed pane.

4. Save specific messages.

This trick can be handy if you want to compile a list of messages to catch up on or refer to later. Move the pointer to the upper-right of a message that you want to save, click the three-dot ( More options ) icon, and click Save this message from the menu that opens.

To see a list of your saved messages, click your profile headshot or icon at the upper right of the Teams app and click Saved from the menu that opens. (Or type /saved into the search bar at the top of the Teams desktop app.) The messages that you saved will appear in the Saved pane toward the left side of the Teams app.

Saving messages bookmarks them for easy access later. (Click image to enlarge it.)

Tip: It can be useful to save messages that have attached files (such as important documents that you need to look at later) without having to download the files.

Make conversations and messages stand out

5. get someone’s attention..

Channels typically contain many conversations — and many messages within those conversations — so it can be easy to overlook a message. To make sure a specific person on your team sees a particular message, tag them as you write your message by typing @ username . (Replace “username” with the person’s user name, of course.) Or: After you type @ , a menu opens listing the names of people in your organization. Click a name on this list to tag them in your message.) Once you post the message, the person will get a notification as a prompt to read it and respond to it.

You can also use this @ function to send a direct message (a one-on-one message) to a team member. Inside the search box at the top of the Microsoft Teams desktop app, type @ and their name (or type @ and click their name from the list that opens). Type a short message in the search box and press Enter or click the right arrow at the right end of the search box.

6. Title your conversations.

One way to help a conversation thread stand out among the other conversations in a channel is by giving it a title. Another plus: You can enter the title into the search box of the Teams desktop app to find the conversation later. You don’t have to title every conversation. It’s best to give titles to only the most important conversations that you want to track.

To add a title as you’re composing a new conversation: Click the Format icon (an “A” with a pencil) at the left end of the toolbar below the text entry field. The message composing window will expand up. On the line that says “Add a subject,” type in a title, then type your message below. Click the Send arrow at the bottom right of the message composing window to post your conversation with its new title to the channel.

Titling key messages can help them stand out and make them easier to find later. (Click image to enlarge it.)

You can also add a title to an existing conversation by moving the pointer to the upper right of the message, clicking the three-dot icon that appears, and clicking Edit from the menu that opens. Click the Format icon at the left end of the toolbar below the text entry field. On the line that says “Add a subject,” type in a title. Click the checkmark at the bottom right of the message composing window to post your conversation with its new title back to the channel.

7. Control the conversation.

The expanded message composing window that appears when you click the Format icon has more neat tricks up its sleeve.

If you want to make a conversation really stand out, you can turn it into an announcement. In the expanded message formatting window, click the New conversation drop-down at the top left and select Announcement . A field appears where you can type a large headline for your post and optionally include a background image or colored background to make it stand out even more.

Tip: By default, everyone in a channel can reply to conversations, but you might not want that for an announcement. If you click the Everyone can reply drop-down at the top of the message composing window, you can select You and moderators can reply to limit responses to only these people.

If you want your conversation to appear in more than one channel, select Post in multiple channels , click the Select channels button, and on the panel that opens, check the boxes next to the channels you want to post your conversation to.

8. Mark a message as important.

One last option for drawing attention to a message in a channel conversation is to mark it as important. Once you post it, Teams will immediately alert the other people in the chat to read your message. They will be reminded to do so every two minutes for 20 minutes. Obviously, you should only use this function for a truly urgent matter.

To mark a message important, click the Format icon. The message composing window will expand up. At the right end of the text formatting toolbar, click the three-dot ( More options ) icon, and from the menu that opens select Mark as important .

All four of these options should be used sparingly, only for conversations and messages of top importance.

Chat more effectively

9. reply to a specific message..

While conversations in team channels are accessible to all members of that team, private chats take place between two or more individuals and are accessible by clicking the Chat icon in the left sidebar.

In a group chat, all messages appear in the order they were posted, no matter who posted them. If you see an earlier message you want to reply to directly, move the mouse pointer over that message. A toolbar of emoticons appears; click the three-dot ( More options ) icon and select Reply on the small menu that opens. Your reply will show the message you’re replying to for context.

10. Pin a message.

You can pin a message to the top of the chat window, bringing it to the attention of others in the chat. Move the mouse pointer over the message you want to pin. The emoticons toolbar appears; click the three-dot icon and select Pin on the small menu that opens.

11. Start a chat in a new window.

Normally, when you start a new chat, it opens in the main window of the Teams desktop app. You can change this so that a new chat opens in a separate window: At the top right of the Teams app, click the three-dot ( Settings and more ) icon and click Settings from the menu that opens. Under “Open new chat in,” click New window .

12. Poll your colleagues.

This feature is currently available only when your Teams app is switched to your personal account. Open the chat where you want to create the poll. Below the box where you type in a message, click the polls icon (represented as three vertical bars). On the panel that opens, type in your poll question and answer choices.

By clicking Add option , you can add up to six answer choices. If you want to allow people to select more than once answer choice, click the switch next to Multiple answers .

Click the Save button to see a preview of your poll. On this preview panel, you can click the Edit button to make changes to your poll. Otherwise, click the Send button. The people in this chat will see this poll and be able to respond to it.

Posting a poll is a quick way to get feedback from others in a chat. (Click image to enlarge it.)

Manage notifications

13. follow important channels..

If you want to be updated of your colleagues’ latest activities in specific channels, open the Teams pane and click a team name to see its channels. Move the pointer over the name of the channel you want to be updated on, click the three-dot ( More options ) icon to the right, select Channel notifications , and click All activity from the menu that opens.

This menu lists another option, Custom . When you click this, the “Channel notification settings” panel opens. Here you can set if you want to be notified whenever a new message is posted to this channel and/or whenever the channel is mentioned by someone in Teams. If you turn either notification on, you can specify if you want to be notified through your Activity pane feed and as a banner, or only through your Activity pane feed.

14. Adjust other notifications.

By default, Teams sends you notifications that update you on several activities — @mentions, new messages, changes to team membership statuses, and more — through various methods such as banner alerts, your Activity pane feed, and email. To adjust or change what you are notified about:

Click your profile pic or initials at the upper right of the Teams desktop app, and then click Manage account . On the Settings panel that opens, click Notifications .

This switches to an extensive list of activities that you can be notified about, letting you choose what kind of notification you want to receive for each (banner and email, banner only, feed only, or off).

You can cut down on distractions by ratcheting down Teams’ notifications. (Click image to enlarge it.)

You may need to experiment with the various settings to find the right balance of notifications that works best for you. But once you’ve figured it out, you’ll be glad you made the adjustments.

Share documents

15. add documents to a channel’s tabs..

A channel has tabs along the top of its main window. By default, these tabs include Posts (for conversations) and Files , where team members can upload and share files. You can also add a tab that displays a document (such as an Excel, PowerPoint, or Word file or a PDF) for members of the channel to see and collaborate on.

Click the Files tab. On the toolbar at the top of this tab, click Upload , and choose the document on your computer or OneDrive. Or you can drag-and-drop the document onto the main window of this channel.

After the document has been uploaded, click the + icon to the right of the existing tabs at the top of the main channel pane. A panel opens, presenting a large selection of web apps. Click the app that would be used to open the document that you just uploaded (e.g., Excel for an Excel file).

Another panel opens. Below “Tab name,” type in a name for this new tab. Then, further below, click the document that you just uploaded and click the Save button.

A new tab with the name you typed in will appear at the top of the channel. Click this tab to switch to it. It will display your document in the channel’s main window. If it’s a Microsoft Office document, you and other team members can edit or comment on it.

You can display an important document in a tab in any channel. (Click image to enlarge it.)

To start a conversation with your team members about this document, click the Show tab conversation icon (the speech balloon) that’s toward the upper-right corner. This will open a conversation sidebar along the right side.

16. Sync files in a channel with OneDrive.

You can sync files that have been uploaded to a channel to your OneDrive storage. When the current files in the channel are updated, or new files are uploaded to the channel, these files will be synced automatically to your OneDrive.

Open the channel that has files you want to sync with. Click the Files tab at the top. On the toolbar at the top of this tab, click Sync . A panel will open that will take you through the steps of signing in to your OneDrive (or OneDrive for Business) account and then setting it to sync with this channel.

17. Use SharePoint to store and share files.

Many enterprises rely on SharePoint for secure file storage and collaboration. If your company is using SharePoint with Teams, you can click the Files tab to share files with your team members via SharePoint, or access SharePoint files that are already shared to the channel.

When you upload a file to the Files tab, it’s automatically saved to the SharePoint site for your team within a folder structure that corresponds to the team’s channels. To go to your SharePoint site, click the three-dot icon in the toolbar at the top of the Files tab and select Open in SharePoint from the menu that opens.

Team members can collaborate on files shared to a channel using Microsoft Office Online or an Office desktop app.

SharePoint team site owners can also add pages, lists, and document libraries as tabs in a Teams channel. In the channel, select the + icon to the right of the tabs at the top of the main pane. On the “Add a tab” panel, select the SharePoint icon. On the panel that appears select the Pages , Lists , or Document libraries tab to see a list of available items to add. Make a selection and click Save . The item will be added as a tab in the channel.

Master meetings

18. auto-adjust your microphone..

The Teams desktop app includes an auto-adjustment feature for your microphone that’s turned on by default. But if you’re experiencing issues, such as your voice sounding too loud or quiet through your mic, check to be sure auto-adjustment is actually on for you — or turn it off to see if things improve without it.

At the top right of the Teams app, click the three-dot ( Settings and more ) icon and click Settings from the menu that opens. In the left column, click Devices . To the right of Automatically adjust mic sensitivity , turn the switch on or off.

19. Let attendees bypass the lobby.

Depending on how Teams is configured in your organization, other meeting attendees may have to wait in a virtual lobby for you (the meeting organizer) to let them in. But you can change the meeting settings so that some or all attendees are able to bypass the meeting lobby.

There are a few different ways to get started:

• In the Teams app, open a meeting from the calendar and click Meeting options . (If you don’t see it, click the three-dot icon in the toolbar and then select Meeting options .)
• In Outlook, open a meeting invitation and click Meeting options .
• In a Teams meeting, select the three-dot ( More actions ) icon in the toolbar at the upper right of the meeting window and select Meeting options . Or click Show participants in the toolbar, click the three-dot icon at the top of the Participants pane, and select Manage participants .

A “Meeting options” pane will open. Next to Who can bypass the lobby? , click the drop-down and select an option. Depending on the edition of Microsoft 365 you’re using, your choices may include “People I invite (Turn off Allow Forwarding in the meeting invite),” “People in my organization,” “People in my organization and guests,” and “Everyone.” In some cases you’ll want to limit the people who can bypass the lobby to those you’ve invited to the meeting; in others it might make more sense to allow anyone in your organization to bypass the lobby. When you’ve made a selection, click Save .

Click the drop-down next to “Why can bypass the lobby?” to allow certain groups of people to enter a meeting immediately. (Click image to enlarge it.)

When the people you’ve designated click to join your meeting, they will be immediately entered into the meeting when it’s in session.

20. Turn off attendees’ cameras and/or mics.

In small meetings, it’s customary for most or all participants to be on camera, but in large meetings, meeting organizers may want to prevent attendees from turning on their cameras and mics to minimize distractions and improve call quality.

To do so before a meeting takes place, go to the “Meeting options” pane as outlined in the previous tip and turn off the Allow mic for attendees? and Allow camera for attendees? switches. Then click Save .

To prevent people from turning on their cameras or mics when a meeting is already taking place, click the three-dot ( More actions ) icon at the top of the Participants pane and select Disable mic for attendees or Disable camera for attendees .

Meeting organizers and presenters can also prevent specific people from turning on their cameras or unmuting their mics during a meeting. Open the list of participants, click the three-dot ( More options ) icon next to the person’s name, and select Disable mic or Disable camera from the menu that opens.

Integrate Teams with other apps

21. send emails directly to a channel..

You can send an email to a channel: Move the pointer over the channel name, click the three-dot icon that appears to the right, and select Get email address . This generates an email address specifically for the channel. Give this to others so that they can send an email to the channel. Their email will be posted to the channel as a conversation, including any files that they attached to the email.

Anyone who has the email address for your channel can send emails to it. To change this, click the channel’s three-dot icon, select Get email address and then the advanced settings link. Select Only members of this team or Only email sent from these domains: (inside which you can type in one or more domains for trusted organizations).

To stop emails from being sent to the channel, click the channel’s three-dot icon and select Get email address > Remove email address .

Another way to post an email to a channel is via Outlook, which has the built-in ability to share emails to Teams channels. While viewing an email in the Outlook desktop app, click Share to Teams in the Ribbon toolbar. In the web app version of Outlook, view the email you want to send and click the three-dot ( More actions ) icon at the top right of the email. From the menu that opens, click Share to Teams .

A “Share to Microsoft Teams” panel appears that lets you designate the channel in Teams you want to send the email to. You can type an additional message if you like, then click the Share button to post the email to the channel.

22. Schedule events with a calendar in your channel.

You can add a calendar to a channel that can be used to schedule events for everyone in that channel to see. Open the channel and click the + icon to the right of the tabs at the top of the channel, which opens the “Add a tab” panel. Click the Channel calendar icon. (If you don’t see the icon right away, start typing channel calendar in the search box.) Then type in a name for this new calendar and click Add .

When an event is added to the channel calendar, a summary post is created in the channel.

To add an event on a channel calendar to your own personal calendar, open the event on the channel calendar and click Add to calendar .

23. Collaborate visually with Microsoft Whiteboard.

Microsoft recently revamped its Whiteboard app, which enables you and your fellow Team members to collaborate on a shared virtual whiteboard. All of you can add text and images to it, which can be created using the app’s sketching tools.

You can use the Whiteboard app during Teams video meetings (see “ The 10 best new Microsoft Teams meeting features ” for details), but you can also add the Whiteboard app to any of your channels or chats. This allows you and your team members to keep adding to the whiteboard over time.

To add a whiteboard to a channel, open the channel and click the + icon at the top of the channel. This will open the “Add a tab” panel. On this panel, click the Whiteboard icon. Another panel will open where you type in a name for the whiteboard. Click the Save button on the lower right, and your new whiteboard will be added to the channel.

To add a whiteboard to a chat, open the chat and look at the tabs across the top of the window. “Whiteboard” may already be listed here, either visible or underneath the “more” menu. Click Whiteboard in either place to add it. If Whiteboard isn’t listed anywhere along the top of your chat, then click the + icon and follow the steps above for adding a whiteboard to a channel.

Embedding a whiteboard in a Teams channel or chat keeps lets teams work on it together over time. (Click image to enlarge it.)

24. Manage tasks with Microsoft Planner.

One perk Teams offers is that you can use other Microsoft 365 apps such as Microsoft Planner inside it by creating a tab for it inside a channel.  To do so, open the channel and click the + icon to the right of the tabs at the top of the channel. On the “Add a tab” panel, click the Tasks by Planner and To Do icon. On the next panel, create a new plan  or select an existing plan for your team and click Save . Then you can quickly add and assign tasks, or see a dashboard for a project in a list, board, chart, or schedule view.

25. Use ‘Loop components’ to collaborate in a chat

Microsoft Loop is a new productivity app that includes components that can be co-edited by work teams in various Microsoft 365 apps. Every Loop component is stored in OneDrive for Business and stays in sync no matter which app users access it from.

In Teams, enterprise users can add a Loop component to a chat so that team members can work on it right in the chat window. It’s similar to co-authoring Word or Excel documents, but Loop components are small snippets such as tables, lists, and paragraphs rather than full documents.

In the main chat window, go to the “Type a new message” text box. Don’t enter any text, but instead click the Loop components icon near the left end of the toolbar below the text window. A menu appears that lets you add a bulleted list, checklist, numbered list, paragraph, table, or task list. Select a component and a draft version of it appears in a panel. For example, if you choose Bulleted list , a panel appears that lets you add a title and bulleted items in the list. If you choose Task list , a panel appears that lets you add task names, assignees, and due dates.

Add information to the component to get it started and click the right arrow ( Send Loop component ) icon at the lower right to post it to the chat. Your co-workers will be able to edit and add to the component together.

Explore extras

26. set your out-of-office status..

Teams lets you quickely set a status message — or schedule one in advance — to alert your team when you’re unavailable. To change your status immediately, click your profile picture on the upper right of the Teams app, click Set status message on the panel that opens, and type a brief status message. Click the drop-down menu under “Clear status message after” and choose a period of time after which your status will revert to Available, such as 4 Hours or Today — or choose Custom and set a specific date and time.

Setting a status message lets your team know you’re not around to read their messages. (Click image to enlarge it.)

To schedule an out-of-office message in advance, click your profile picture > Set status message , then click the Schedule out of office link on the lower left of the status panel. (Or from anywhere in Teams, click the three-dot ( Settings and more ) icon on the upper right of the Teams desktop app, click Settings , scroll down, and under the “Out of Office” heading, click Schedule .)

Either method will open the “Out of Office” panel where you can turn on the automatic-reply function and type in a reply message that will be sent whenever someone tries to contact you through Teams. You can set how long your away status will remain active by clicking the checkbox next to Send replies only during a time period and entering start and end dates. When you’re done, click Save .

27. Invite others into the fold.

In Microsoft Teams, you’re not limited to collaborating with people in your own team. You can provide guest access to anyone at your company who has an Outlook account. Try this by typing their name into the search box of the Microsoft Teams desktop app. You can then send them a direct message from the search box as described in tip #5 (“Get someone’s attention”) in this guide.

In fact, guest access isn’t limited to those within your own organization. You can invite anyone who has a Microsoft account by adding them as a member to a channel or tagging them in a message.

Guests have fewer privileges than full team members, but they can create and participate in channels and chats.

Microsoft has announced a feature called Teams Connect that will give you the ability to invite external collaborators to a particular channel without setting up guest accounts; however, it’s still in private beta testing and has not yet been rolled out generally.

28. Use keyboard shortcuts.

It’s always helpful to know the keyboard shortcuts for an app. In Teams, you can press the R key on your keyboard to reply to a conversation. Press Ctrl-O ( ⌘-O on a Mac) to quickly attach a file to a message. To see all the keyboard shortcuts that are available in Teams, press the Ctrl and period keys together (the ⌘ and period keys on Mac).

Press Ctrl-. or ⌘ -. to see a list of keyboard shortcuts for Teams. (Click image to enlarge it.)

This article was originally published in November 2017 and most recently updated in March 2022.

• Microsoft Teams cheat sheet
• 11 best practices for Microsoft Teams video meetings
• The 10 best new Microsoft Teams meeting features

Related content

Google can’t seem to quit cookies, delays killing them again, apple reportedly cuts vision pro production due to low demand, windows 11: a guide to the updates, windows 10: a guide to the updates, from our editors straight to your inbox.

John Brandon is a technologist, product tester, car enthusiast and professional writer. Before becoming a writer, he worked in the corporate sector for 10 years. He has published over 8,500 articles, many of them for Computerworld, TechHive, Macworld and other IDG entities.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of John Brandon and do not necessarily represent those of IDG Communications, Inc., its parent, subsidiary or affiliated companies.

More from this author

8 ways businesses can take advantage of the iphone x, anatomy of a spambot, what apple’s new push into ar means for your business.

Howard Wen ( www.howardwen.com ) is a longtime contributor to Computerworld . He specializes in explainer guides, how-tos, and reviews of office applications and productivity tools.

Google Sheets power tips: How to use dropdown lists

Google workspace power tips: tap into cross-app productivity, how to use google’s genai-powered note-taking app, how to use the new genai template tool in google sheets, show me more, the end of non-compete agreements is a tech job earthquake.

Meta opens its mixed-reality Horizon OS to other headset makers

A crafty new Android notification power-up

After 10 years of progress, does mixed reality (XR) have a future? | Ep. 147

More tech layoffs as AI takes hold | Ep. 146

Why the world will be wearing more technology in the future

After 10 years of progress, does mixed reality (XR) have a future?

More tech layoffs as AI takes hold

• Join a Teams meeting Video
• Tips for Teams meetings Video
• Meet instantly Video
• Manage meetings Video
• Schedule a webinar Video
• Add Q&A to webinars and meetings Video
• Show your screen during a meeting Video
• Tip: Show PowerPoint slides Video

Tips for Teams meetings

Enhance and customize your meeting experience in Microsoft Teams with these audio, video, and collaboration tips. 

Preview your video

When you're in a meeting, preview your video before you turn on your camera: 

Hover over  Turn camera on  to preview your video.

Preview how you'd like to appear:

Select Blur my background to blur your background.

Select More background effects to preview a custom background or add your own.

When you're ready, select Apply and turn on video .

Share your screen

Select Share content  to present your screen. You can share:

Your desktop

PowerPoint presentation

Raise your hand and show reactions

Under Reactions , choose how to engage in a meeting:

Select Raise hand to let others know you'd like to speak up without interrupting the conversation.

Choose a reaction like Applause or Heart to show how you feel.

Spotlight a video

When a featured speaker's talking, spotlight their video so it's the main one everyone sees.

Right-click whose video you want to spotlight, select Spotlight  >  Spotlight once more to confirm.

Choose a video layout

There are different video layouts for your meeting. On the meeting controls, select  More options ( ... ) and choose one:

Gallery : This is the default view that shows a 3x3 video layout.

Note:  If there's more than nine people, Teams prioritizes anyone with their video turned on, or those speaking the most.

Large gallery : This is a 7x7 video layout that lets you see up to 49 other people at once.

Note:  10 people must have their camera turned on. If no one's sharing video, Large gallery cannot be selected from the menu.

Together mode : This layout lets you feel like you're in the same shared space with everyone in the meeting. Select Change scene  to change the background for everyone.

Note:  Together mode is available if there's at least five people in a meeting.

Create breakout rooms

Create and open breakout rooms to let attendees hold smaller, more focused discussions.

On the meeting controls, select Breakout rooms .

Choose how many rooms you need and how to assign participants.

Select Create rooms > Start rooms .

Join a Teams meeting

Manage meetings

Need more help?

Want more options.

Explore subscription benefits, browse training courses, learn how to secure your device, and more.

Microsoft 365 subscription benefits

Microsoft 365 training

Microsoft security

Accessibility center

Communities help you ask and answer questions, give feedback, and hear from experts with rich knowledge.

Ask the Microsoft Community

Microsoft Tech Community

Windows Insiders

Microsoft 365 Insiders

Was this information helpful?

Thank you for your feedback.

Home / Blog / 17 Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks You Didn’t Know You Needed

17 Microsoft Teams Tips and Tricks You Didn’t Know You Needed

August 18th, 2020 by Emily Houssier

So you’ve learned the ropes of Microsoft Teams and overcome the hurdles of staying in touch with your coworkers from afar. But are you really making the most out of your Teams experience? This single app is in fact a workplace productivity hub that can help you achieve everyday tasks in less time. We’ve accumulated some of the top Microsoft Teams tips and tricks to start incorporating into your workflow.

Tips for Productivity

From saving time to improving focus, use these hacks to be more productive while using Microsoft Teams .

Learn frequent commands

Did you know that the search bar in Teams doubles as a command line? Type in one of the recognized commands to take a shortcut to some of the most frequent tasks: /files to view your recent files, /unread to see new activity, and /call to make a call, to name a few. View the current list of accepted commands on Microsoft’s website.

Turn on do not disturb

Constant pings from incoming messages can be a productivity killer when you’re trying to focus. Turn off those unwanted distractions by enabling do not disturb mode. Just click your profile icon in Teams to set your status to do not disturb (or enter the command /dnd into the search bar.)

Want to make sure you don’t miss any important messages from your boss while you’re hidden? Set up priority access for any individuals whose messages you want to receive even while notifications are paused. Users can be granted priority access in your privacy settings.

Use @mention to send and filter messages

Shooting off a quick message to a colleague doesn’t mean you need to leave what you’re doing and find their conversation in Teams. Just type the @ sign directly into the search bar to find their name and send a message from wherever you are in the application.

@mentions are also useful to filter recent activity and prioritize messages directed at you. While in the Activity feed, click the filter button and choose @mentions from the dropdown menu.

Mark messages as unread

Have you ever read a message that you don’t have time to address right away but forgotten to circle back later? Microsoft Teams gives you the ability to mark messages as unread by clicking the three dots next to a message while in a conversation or the Activity feed.

Bookmark content

Want to save an important message for later? Click the bookmark icon to make sure you won’t have trouble finding it. Review your bookmarks by typing the command /saved into the search bar.

Tips for Organization

There’s a lot of content in Teams. These tips will help you keep it all organized .

Favourite teams and channels

Are there specific teams and channels you access most frequently throughout the day? Keep them at the top of the list by marking them as favourites. Click the three dots next to the team or channel name and select Favorite.

Reorder teams with drag and drop

Favouriting a team places it in a separate category at the top of the pane, but you can also control where the rest of your teams fall on the general list. Just click and drag a team in the direction you want it to go. When the list turns gray, you can place it in the correct position.

Group users into tags

Sometimes it’s useful to create subgroups within teams based on role, project, or location. Tags can help you do just this, making it easy to @mention or start a chat with everyone included under the tag. Include and manage tags efficiently in your Microsoft Teams options.

Add custom tabs

Every new channel is preconfigured with two tabs: Conversations and Files. But users can add custom tabs for other Microsoft 365 tools, websites, and third-party apps, allowing them to perform tasks without switching to a new window.

Tips for Engagement

Make communication more dynamic with these ideas for engagement .

Add subject lines

Grab attention and break up conversations by adding subject lines to your messages. Subject lines are among the rich text formatting options found in the expanded view pane that appears when you click the Format button under the message box. Rich text formatting also lets you change text size, weight, and colour, add links, and even incorporate numbered and bulleted lists.

Send stickers and GIFs

A picture is worth a thousand words. Incorporate stickers and GIFs to convey thoughts and emotions that words don’t do justice by selecting either option from below the message box.

Survey the group with polls

Instead of typing a question into a channel, why not use a poll to gather feedback more efficiently? Click the Forms icon below the message box to create and send a poll in Teams.

Send urgent notifications

Need an immediate reply? Click the exclamation point below the message box before you press send to mark a message as important. The recipient will get notifications every two minutes for the next 20 minutes or until it’s read.

Tips for Better Meetings

Use these Microsoft Teams meeting tips to bring your virtual gatherings to the next level.

Start calls directly within a chat

It’s easy for a text chat to turn into a conversation that needs more in-depth discussion. Start a quick call directly within a chat by clicking the video or audio call button.

Blur your background

As many of us continue to work from home, there may be a few things in the background that you don’t want everyone at work to see. Remove distractions like the kids playing superheroes or last week’s dirty laundry by blurring your background. This feature can be found by clicking the three dots at the bottom of your video call.

Record and transcribe your meeting

Keeping a recording of virtual meetings can be incredibly helpful for review later. Once you start recording from the meeting control panel, a copy of the meeting will be saved to Microsoft Stream for everyone to access securely. You can also generate a meeting transcript using the native features in Stream.

Take meeting notes

Use Together Mode

One of the newest Microsoft Teams features, Together Mode, places all your meeting participants on a shared background to make it appear that they are all sitting in the same room (like an auditorium or cafe.) Together Mode is located in your in-call background options.

Tips for Better Management

Even if you successfully navigated a remote Teams adoption , you may have started to realize that managing Teams internally is a labour-intensive project. This is where many companies come to appreciate the value of a third-party enhancement platform that takes the legwork out of Teams governance.

Powell Teams is an all-inclusive solution created by Powell Software, an award-winning workplace productivity software provider and member of the Microsoft Partner Network. The platform upgrades your entire organization’s Teams experience with customizable dashboards, no-code templates, and more. Powell Teams is available for download directly from the Microsoft Teams store.

Curious to see what other Microsoft Teams tips and tricks we have up our sleeve? Start your free trial of Powell Teams today in just a few clicks.

Subscribe to our newsletter and receive the latest information about the Digital Workplace every month.

Try Process AI free

How to share a presentation on microsoft teams.

Do you want to share a presentation on Microsoft Teams ? We’ll take you through the steps of sharing your PowerPoint slides with ease!

• Log into Teams and locate the channel or chat .
• In the message box, click the “Attach” button .
• Select “File” from the drop-down menu and upload the presentation.
• Now everyone can access it.

There’s more! Did you know you can present your slides directly in a meeting?

• Navigate to the meeting or start a new one.
• Click the “Share” button and select “PowerPoint” .
• Present in a window or share a file. This helps participants follow along.

Make your presentations more engaging by using live captions . This is helpful for those with hearing difficulty and those in noisy environments.

Promote active participation from your audience. Use features like annotations and highlighting tools which emphasize key points and gather feedback. This encourages teamwork and productivity.

Overview of Microsoft Teams presentation sharing

Sharing presentations on Microsoft Teams ? It’s a breeze! Just select the file you want to share & who you want to share it with – and you’re good to go. Plus, real-time editing capabilities enable multiple users to work on the same presentation simultaneously. You can even present slides directly from Teams, making collaboration faster and easier. To optimize viewing quality, make sure to adjust resolution settings. There you have it – seamless information exchange and team productivity in no time!

Step 1: Accessing the Microsoft Teams platform

To share a presentation on Microsoft Teams, you must access the platform first. It is key for successful collaboration and communication between your team. Follow these simple steps to easily access Microsoft Teams and begin sharing presentations!

• Go to the Teams website in your web browser.
• Enter your email address and password.
• Click “Sign In”.
• On the dashboard, click “Join or create a team” on the left.
• Choose a team from the list or enter a code from your team leader.
• To create a new team, click “Create Team” and follow the prompts.
• After joining/creating a team, you have access to Teams’ features.
• Use different channels and tabs to interact with your team and locate files.
• To share a presentation, go to the “Files” tab in a channel and upload the PowerPoint.

Don’t miss this opportunity to engage with your team using Microsoft Teams. Communicate, exchange ideas and share presentations quickly and easily. Start sharing now!

Step 2: Starting a presentation sharing session

• Log into your account with the Teams app.
• Pick the channel you’ll share your presentation to.
• Look for the “Share” button at the bottom of the chat window.
• Select the presentation file you wish to share with “Browse teams and channels”.
• Once you’ve chosen the file, click “Share” to start the sesh.
• Navigate your slides with the provided controls.

Make sure everyone has access to the presentation. Plus, Teams offers collaboration features like annotating and questioning through chat.

Pro Tip: Check your internet connection’s stable before you start the presentation sharing session. No interruptions!

Step 3: Choosing the sharing options

When it comes to sharing presentations on Microsoft Teams, choosing the right option is key. Here’s how to do it:

• Click the “Share” button at the bottom of the meeting screen.
• A pop-up window will appear with several options – select “PowerPoint” to share a presentation.
• Next, decide whether you want to share your entire desktop or just a single window. This lets you control what the participants see.
• Finally, click “Share” to start sharing your presentation.

Remember to double-check that your presentation looks good before you continue with the meeting.

Furthermore, Microsoft Teams offers extra features such as annotation tools and letting people edit documents simultaneously – this boosts collaboration and involvement during presentations.

Did you know that Microsoft Teams is now one of the most popular collaboration tools for businesses? Its easy-to-use interface and many features make it great for remote working.

Step 4: Sharing the presentation

Sharing a presentation on Microsoft Teams is crucial for efficient collaboration with your team. Follow these steps to easily share and engage your audience:

• Get Ready: Make sure your presentation has all the content and visuals you need. This helps others understand your message.
• Open Teams: Launch the Teams app on your computer or use the web version. Sign in with your details to access the workspace.
• Join/Start Meeting: Join an existing meeting or start a new one. Sharing presentations is usually done in meetings with discussion and collaboration.
• To share the entire PowerPoint, select “PowerPoint”.
• To share slides or other documents, choose “Browse”.
• Teams has extra options like Slide Show mode or sharing single application windows.
• Engage Participants: Choose the sharing method, file, or slides. Click “Share” to start presenting. Participants view your presentation in real-time. They can ask questions or give feedback via chat or audio.

Follow these steps for successful collaboration on Microsoft Teams. Be prepared, use appropriate sharing methods, and engage your audience.

Step 5: Navigating and presenting the slides

Want to know how to smoothly move through slides on Microsoft Teams? Here’s the step-by-step guide:

• Press the “Share” button at the bottom of your screen to start presenting.
• Use the arrows on your keyboard or click the navigation buttons to go back and forth between slides.
• If you need to jump to a specific slide, select the “Go to slide” option and enter the number.
• To end presentation mode, click the “Stop presenting” button at the top of your screen.

Plus, use shortcuts like “B” to black out your screen and “W” to display a whiteboard. This helps keep the presentation on track.

A funny thing happened to a colleague presenting slides on Teams. Instead of advancing to the next slide, they clicked an emoji reaction. This caused a lot of laughter. It’s a great reminder to double-check actions when navigating virtual slides.

Step 6: Ending the presentation sharing session

To finish the Microsoft Teams presentation-sharing session, do these steps:

• Click on the presentation screen to go to the meeting controls.
• Find the ‘Stop Presenting’ button at the top of the screen. Then click it.
• A pop-up will appear. It’ll ask if you want to stop presenting. Click ‘Stop Presenting’ again to confirm.
• The presentation sharing session will end. You’ll go back to your regular view of the meeting.
• You can stay in the meeting or leave.

Remember, ending the presentation-sharing session doesn’t mean you have to leave the meeting. You can still talk with others and contribute to discussions before you finish.

Pro Tip: Before you finish the presentation-sharing session, make sure all the points are covered and all questions or concerns are answered. This will help everyone finish the session on a good note.

Share presentations on Microsoft Teams for simple, efficient results! Just follow the steps outlined in this article. Showcase your work, collaborate, and ensure everyone’s on the same page.

• First, upload the file to the platform. Select “Share” and choose the presentation from your files. You can share your entire screen or just a specific window. This lets you control what participants see.
• Navigate through slides smoothly. Make sure participants see each slide clearly. Use presenter view and annotations. Use laser pointer tools for clearer communication.
• Microsoft Teams also offers a recording feature. If you want to share with those who weren’t able to attend or review later, you can record the meeting. Everyone will have access to the presentation.

Start sharing today and experience seamless communication!

Additional tips and troubleshooting guidelines

• Double check the sharing settings. Ensure you enabled the right permissions on Microsoft Teams before the presentation. It will let everyone view and interact with it without issues.
• Optimize your internet connection. Stable and reliable internet is needed for successful presentation sharing. Use a wired network or strong Wi-Fi to avoid interruptions.
• Be mindful when sharing your screen. Close any unnecessary applications or tabs. This will reduce distractions and maintain a professional atmosphere.
• Remember, attention to detail is key when presenting on Microsoft Teams. Consider the tips and troubleshooting guidelines. This will help you deliver a seamless and engaging presentation.
• Technical issues may occur despite preparation. Remain calm and try restarting the app or checking compatibility. If nothing works, contact the support team for assistance.

Let me tell you a story. A colleague had a crucial sales pitch through Teams. His PowerPoint slides didn’t display properly. He had taken our tips into account and switched to screen sharing mode. He was able to deliver his pitch using alternative tools within seconds. This shows the value of flexibility and quick thinking in overcoming challenges while presenting on Microsoft Teams.

No credit card required

Your projects are processes, Take control of them today.

• SUGGESTED TOPICS
• The Magazine
• Newsletters
• Managing Yourself
• Managing Teams
• Work-life Balance
• The Big Idea
• Data & Visuals
• Reading Lists
• Case Selections
• HBR Learning
• Topic Feeds
• Account Settings
• Email Preferences

How to Make a “Good” Presentation “Great”

• Guy Kawasaki

Remember: Less is more.

A strong presentation is so much more than information pasted onto a series of slides with fancy backgrounds. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others. Here are some unique elements that make a presentation stand out.

• Fonts: Sans Serif fonts such as Helvetica or Arial are preferred for their clean lines, which make them easy to digest at various sizes and distances. Limit the number of font styles to two: one for headings and another for body text, to avoid visual confusion or distractions.
• Colors: Colors can evoke emotions and highlight critical points, but their overuse can lead to a cluttered and confusing presentation. A limited palette of two to three main colors, complemented by a simple background, can help you draw attention to key elements without overwhelming the audience.
• Pictures: Pictures can communicate complex ideas quickly and memorably but choosing the right images is key. Images or pictures should be big (perhaps 20-25% of the page), bold, and have a clear purpose that complements the slide’s text.
• Layout: Don’t overcrowd your slides with too much information. When in doubt, adhere to the principle of simplicity, and aim for a clean and uncluttered layout with plenty of white space around text and images. Think phrases and bullets, not sentences.

As an intern or early career professional, chances are that you’ll be tasked with making or giving a presentation in the near future. Whether you’re pitching an idea, reporting market research, or sharing something else, a great presentation can give you a competitive advantage, and be a powerful tool when aiming to persuade, educate, or inspire others.

• Guy Kawasaki is the chief evangelist at Canva and was the former chief evangelist at Apple. Guy is the author of 16 books including Think Remarkable : 9 Paths to Transform Your Life and Make a Difference.

Partner Center

More From Forbes

3 tips for managing team conflict.

• Share to Facebook
• Share to Twitter
• Share to Linkedin

A more holistic approach to conflict management is to work with the entire team to better understand ... [+] the challenges they face and design a joint way forward.

Conflict in teams is becoming more complex. Global trends , such as increased disconnection and Gen Z entering the workforce, are changing team dynamics. Although conflict, when managed constructively, is beneficial to high-performing teams, harmful conflict will negatively affect the health and productivity of individuals and teams. With managers juggling multiple pressures, ignoring interpersonal challenges at work can be tempting. However, sweeping issues under the carpet is not the answer. For any manager seeing the warning signs, here are three tips to help navigate team conflict.

1. Start with the individuals

When a manager notices a potential conflict brewing in their team, the first step is to try to connect one-on-one with the individuals involved. This will allow the manager to check in with an employee and enable the employee to express their concerns and potential ideas for moving things forward constructively. When a manager approaches this conversation without taking sides, and by asking open questions, this will help the team member to be open, non-defensive and collaborative.

One of the key elements the manager is looking for here is whether this is a one-off, something that has blown over, or whether it might benefit from being explored further. If the situation is causing distress, or is affecting people’s ability to work together, a manager could encourage those involved to talk directly with each other. It may be that teammates feel comfortable doing this themselves, or they may need support from their manager. If the manager is asked to facilitate a conversation, they need to be clear on their role in this meeting. For example, how will they maintain impartiality? Do they have the skills to facilitate the meeting on their own? If the parties are entrenched in their conflict, they may need expert HR advice or third-party conflict resolution services, such as workplace mediation.

2. Consider the team

The next step is to consider the wider team. Conflict may show up at an individual level, but these individuals are part of a wider organizational system. When conflict between two or more individuals becomes destructive, it invariably affects the wider team. It’s common for team members to get drawn into a conflict; they end up taking sides, which squanders time and energy. In some instances, a more holistic approach to conflict management is to work with the entire team to better understand the challenges they face and design a joint way forward.

The ideal, however, is that a manager would proactively bring the team together to consider how to deal with future challenges before they arise. Creating a team conflict charter with the input and ideas of all team members is a useful way to ensure that the team understands and agrees on how they will communicate with each other and handle future disagreements or disputes.

Apple iPhone 16 Unique All New Design Promised In New Report

Meet the fintech billionaire making a fortune rewarding home renters, huawei s pura 70 ultra beats iphone with pioneering new feature, 3. look to yourself.

A manager plays a key role in the conflict culture of the team, as well as many other aspects of team relationship dynamics. The third tip is for the manager to look to themselves by increasing their self-awareness and identifying their preferences regarding conflict. Is their natural style to be an ostrich, DIYer or a bureaucrat? For example, a manager who ignores a long and heated series of emails might be taking the ‘ostrich’ approach, or one who leaps straight in to fix the issue may be a ‘DIYer.’ By recognizing any natural tendencies and understanding the impact of these on others in the team, the manager can choose a more effective approach.

When the warning signs of team conflict appear, a manager can proactively talk to the key individuals, consider a more comprehensive team solution, and reflect on their own conflict management approach. Rather than sweeping issues under the carpet, managers can facilitate a ‘spring clean,’ using conflict as an opportunity to communicate better with the team and build stronger relationships at work.

• Editorial Standards
• Reprints & Permissions

Our approach

• Responsibility
• Infrastructure
• Try Meta AI

RECOMMENDED READS

• 5 Steps to Getting Started with Llama 2
• The Llama Ecosystem: Past, Present, and Future
• Introducing Code Llama, a state-of-the-art large language model for coding
• Meta and Microsoft Introduce the Next Generation of Llama
• Today, we’re introducing Meta Llama 3, the next generation of our state-of-the-art open source large language model.
• Llama 3 models will soon be available on AWS, Databricks, Google Cloud, Hugging Face, Kaggle, IBM WatsonX, Microsoft Azure, NVIDIA NIM, and Snowflake, and with support from hardware platforms offered by AMD, AWS, Dell, Intel, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm.
• We’re dedicated to developing Llama 3 in a responsible way, and we’re offering various resources to help others use it responsibly as well. This includes introducing new trust and safety tools with Llama Guard 2, Code Shield, and CyberSec Eval 2.
• In the coming months, we expect to introduce new capabilities, longer context windows, additional model sizes, and enhanced performance, and we’ll share the Llama 3 research paper.
• Meta AI, built with Llama 3 technology, is now one of the world’s leading AI assistants that can boost your intelligence and lighten your load—helping you learn, get things done, create content, and connect to make the most out of every moment. You can try Meta AI here .

Today, we’re excited to share the first two models of the next generation of Llama, Meta Llama 3, available for broad use. This release features pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned language models with 8B and 70B parameters that can support a broad range of use cases. This next generation of Llama demonstrates state-of-the-art performance on a wide range of industry benchmarks and offers new capabilities, including improved reasoning. We believe these are the best open source models of their class, period. In support of our longstanding open approach, we’re putting Llama 3 in the hands of the community. We want to kickstart the next wave of innovation in AI across the stack—from applications to developer tools to evals to inference optimizations and more. We can’t wait to see what you build and look forward to your feedback.

Our goals for Llama 3

With Llama 3, we set out to build the best open models that are on par with the best proprietary models available today. We wanted to address developer feedback to increase the overall helpfulness of Llama 3 and are doing so while continuing to play a leading role on responsible use and deployment of LLMs. We are embracing the open source ethos of releasing early and often to enable the community to get access to these models while they are still in development. The text-based models we are releasing today are the first in the Llama 3 collection of models. Our goal in the near future is to make Llama 3 multilingual and multimodal, have longer context, and continue to improve overall performance across core LLM capabilities such as reasoning and coding.

State-of-the-art performance

Our new 8B and 70B parameter Llama 3 models are a major leap over Llama 2 and establish a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales. Thanks to improvements in pretraining and post-training, our pretrained and instruction-fine-tuned models are the best models existing today at the 8B and 70B parameter scale. Improvements in our post-training procedures substantially reduced false refusal rates, improved alignment, and increased diversity in model responses. We also saw greatly improved capabilities like reasoning, code generation, and instruction following making Llama 3 more steerable.

*Please see evaluation details for setting and parameters with which these evaluations are calculated.

In the development of Llama 3, we looked at model performance on standard benchmarks and also sought to optimize for performance for real-world scenarios. To this end, we developed a new high-quality human evaluation set. This evaluation set contains 1,800 prompts that cover 12 key use cases: asking for advice, brainstorming, classification, closed question answering, coding, creative writing, extraction, inhabiting a character/persona, open question answering, reasoning, rewriting, and summarization. To prevent accidental overfitting of our models on this evaluation set, even our own modeling teams do not have access to it. The chart below shows aggregated results of our human evaluations across of these categories and prompts against Claude Sonnet, Mistral Medium, and GPT-3.5.

Preference rankings by human annotators based on this evaluation set highlight the strong performance of our 70B instruction-following model compared to competing models of comparable size in real-world scenarios.

Our pretrained model also establishes a new state-of-the-art for LLM models at those scales.

To develop a great language model, we believe it’s important to innovate, scale, and optimize for simplicity. We adopted this design philosophy throughout the Llama 3 project with a focus on four key ingredients: the model architecture, the pretraining data, scaling up pretraining, and instruction fine-tuning.

Model architecture

In line with our design philosophy, we opted for a relatively standard decoder-only transformer architecture in Llama 3. Compared to Llama 2, we made several key improvements. Llama 3 uses a tokenizer with a vocabulary of 128K tokens that encodes language much more efficiently, which leads to substantially improved model performance. To improve the inference efficiency of Llama 3 models, we’ve adopted grouped query attention (GQA) across both the 8B and 70B sizes. We trained the models on sequences of 8,192 tokens, using a mask to ensure self-attention does not cross document boundaries.

Training data

To train the best language model, the curation of a large, high-quality training dataset is paramount. In line with our design principles, we invested heavily in pretraining data. Llama 3 is pretrained on over 15T tokens that were all collected from publicly available sources. Our training dataset is seven times larger than that used for Llama 2, and it includes four times more code. To prepare for upcoming multilingual use cases, over 5% of the Llama 3 pretraining dataset consists of high-quality non-English data that covers over 30 languages. However, we do not expect the same level of performance in these languages as in English.

To ensure Llama 3 is trained on data of the highest quality, we developed a series of data-filtering pipelines. These pipelines include using heuristic filters, NSFW filters, semantic deduplication approaches, and text classifiers to predict data quality. We found that previous generations of Llama are surprisingly good at identifying high-quality data, hence we used Llama 2 to generate the training data for the text-quality classifiers that are powering Llama 3.

We also performed extensive experiments to evaluate the best ways of mixing data from different sources in our final pretraining dataset. These experiments enabled us to select a data mix that ensures that Llama 3 performs well across use cases including trivia questions, STEM, coding, historical knowledge, etc.

Scaling up pretraining

To effectively leverage our pretraining data in Llama 3 models, we put substantial effort into scaling up pretraining. Specifically, we have developed a series of detailed scaling laws for downstream benchmark evaluations. These scaling laws enable us to select an optimal data mix and to make informed decisions on how to best use our training compute. Importantly, scaling laws allow us to predict the performance of our largest models on key tasks (for example, code generation as evaluated on the HumanEval benchmark—see above) before we actually train the models. This helps us ensure strong performance of our final models across a variety of use cases and capabilities.

We made several new observations on scaling behavior during the development of Llama 3. For example, while the Chinchilla-optimal amount of training compute for an 8B parameter model corresponds to ~200B tokens, we found that model performance continues to improve even after the model is trained on two orders of magnitude more data. Both our 8B and 70B parameter models continued to improve log-linearly after we trained them on up to 15T tokens. Larger models can match the performance of these smaller models with less training compute, but smaller models are generally preferred because they are much more efficient during inference.

To train our largest Llama 3 models, we combined three types of parallelization: data parallelization, model parallelization, and pipeline parallelization. Our most efficient implementation achieves a compute utilization of over 400 TFLOPS per GPU when trained on 16K GPUs simultaneously. We performed training runs on two custom-built 24K GPU clusters . To maximize GPU uptime, we developed an advanced new training stack that automates error detection, handling, and maintenance. We also greatly improved our hardware reliability and detection mechanisms for silent data corruption, and we developed new scalable storage systems that reduce overheads of checkpointing and rollback. Those improvements resulted in an overall effective training time of more than 95%. Combined, these improvements increased the efficiency of Llama 3 training by ~three times compared to Llama 2.

Instruction fine-tuning

To fully unlock the potential of our pretrained models in chat use cases, we innovated on our approach to instruction-tuning as well. Our approach to post-training is a combination of supervised fine-tuning (SFT), rejection sampling, proximal policy optimization (PPO), and direct preference optimization (DPO). The quality of the prompts that are used in SFT and the preference rankings that are used in PPO and DPO has an outsized influence on the performance of aligned models. Some of our biggest improvements in model quality came from carefully curating this data and performing multiple rounds of quality assurance on annotations provided by human annotators.

Learning from preference rankings via PPO and DPO also greatly improved the performance of Llama 3 on reasoning and coding tasks. We found that if you ask a model a reasoning question that it struggles to answer, the model will sometimes produce the right reasoning trace: The model knows how to produce the right answer, but it does not know how to select it. Training on preference rankings enables the model to learn how to select it.

Building with Llama 3

Our vision is to enable developers to customize Llama 3 to support relevant use cases and to make it easier to adopt best practices and improve the open ecosystem. With this release, we’re providing new trust and safety tools including updated components with both Llama Guard 2 and Cybersec Eval 2, and the introduction of Code Shield—an inference time guardrail for filtering insecure code produced by LLMs.

We’ve also co-developed Llama 3 with torchtune , the new PyTorch-native library for easily authoring, fine-tuning, and experimenting with LLMs. torchtune provides memory efficient and hackable training recipes written entirely in PyTorch. The library is integrated with popular platforms such as Hugging Face, Weights & Biases, and EleutherAI and even supports Executorch for enabling efficient inference to be run on a wide variety of mobile and edge devices. For everything from prompt engineering to using Llama 3 with LangChain we have a comprehensive getting started guide and takes you from downloading Llama 3 all the way to deployment at scale within your generative AI application.

A system-level approach to responsibility

We have designed Llama 3 models to be maximally helpful while ensuring an industry leading approach to responsibly deploying them. To achieve this, we have adopted a new, system-level approach to the responsible development and deployment of Llama. We envision Llama models as part of a broader system that puts the developer in the driver’s seat. Llama models will serve as a foundational piece of a system that developers design with their unique end goals in mind.

Instruction fine-tuning also plays a major role in ensuring the safety of our models. Our instruction-fine-tuned models have been red-teamed (tested) for safety through internal and external efforts. ​​Our red teaming approach leverages human experts and automation methods to generate adversarial prompts that try to elicit problematic responses. For instance, we apply comprehensive testing to assess risks of misuse related to Chemical, Biological, Cyber Security, and other risk areas. All of these efforts are iterative and used to inform safety fine-tuning of the models being released. You can read more about our efforts in the model card .

Llama Guard models are meant to be a foundation for prompt and response safety and can easily be fine-tuned to create a new taxonomy depending on application needs. As a starting point, the new Llama Guard 2 uses the recently announced MLCommons taxonomy, in an effort to support the emergence of industry standards in this important area. Additionally, CyberSecEval 2 expands on its predecessor by adding measures of an LLM’s propensity to allow for abuse of its code interpreter, offensive cybersecurity capabilities, and susceptibility to prompt injection attacks (learn more in our technical paper ). Finally, we’re introducing Code Shield which adds support for inference-time filtering of insecure code produced by LLMs. This offers mitigation of risks around insecure code suggestions, code interpreter abuse prevention, and secure command execution.

With the speed at which the generative AI space is moving, we believe an open approach is an important way to bring the ecosystem together and mitigate these potential harms. As part of that, we’re updating our Responsible Use Guide (RUG) that provides a comprehensive guide to responsible development with LLMs. As we outlined in the RUG, we recommend that all inputs and outputs be checked and filtered in accordance with content guidelines appropriate to the application. Additionally, many cloud service providers offer content moderation APIs and other tools for responsible deployment, and we encourage developers to also consider using these options.

Deploying Llama 3 at scale

Llama 3 will soon be available on all major platforms including cloud providers, model API providers, and much more. Llama 3 will be everywhere .

Our benchmarks show the tokenizer offers improved token efficiency, yielding up to 15% fewer tokens compared to Llama 2. Also, Group Query Attention (GQA) now has been added to Llama 3 8B as well. As a result, we observed that despite the model having 1B more parameters compared to Llama 2 7B, the improved tokenizer efficiency and GQA contribute to maintaining the inference efficiency on par with Llama 2 7B.

For examples of how to leverage all of these capabilities, check out Llama Recipes which contains all of our open source code that can be leveraged for everything from fine-tuning to deployment to model evaluation.

What’s next for Llama 3?

The Llama 3 8B and 70B models mark the beginning of what we plan to release for Llama 3. And there’s a lot more to come.

Our largest models are over 400B parameters and, while these models are still training, our team is excited about how they’re trending. Over the coming months, we’ll release multiple models with new capabilities including multimodality, the ability to converse in multiple languages, a much longer context window, and stronger overall capabilities. We will also publish a detailed research paper once we are done training Llama 3.

To give you a sneak preview for where these models are today as they continue training, we thought we could share some snapshots of how our largest LLM model is trending. Please note that this data is based on an early checkpoint of Llama 3 that is still training and these capabilities are not supported as part of the models released today.

We’re committed to the continued growth and development of an open AI ecosystem for releasing our models responsibly. We have long believed that openness leads to better, safer products, faster innovation, and a healthier overall market. This is good for Meta, and it is good for society. We’re taking a community-first approach with Llama 3, and starting today, these models are available on the leading cloud, hosting, and hardware platforms with many more to come.

Try Meta Llama 3 today

We’ve integrated our latest models into Meta AI, which we believe is the world’s leading AI assistant. It’s now built with Llama 3 technology and it’s available in more countries across our apps.

You can use Meta AI on Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and the web to get things done, learn, create, and connect with the things that matter to you. You can read more about the Meta AI experience here .

Visit the Llama 3 website to download the models and reference the Getting Started Guide for the latest list of all available platforms.

You’ll also soon be able to test multimodal Meta AI on our Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses.

As always, we look forward to seeing all the amazing products and experiences you will build with Meta Llama 3.

Our latest updates delivered to your inbox

Subscribe to our newsletter to keep up with Meta AI news, events, research breakthroughs, and more.

Join us in the pursuit of what’s possible with AI.

Product experiences

Foundational models

Latest news

Meta © 2024

How Bears plan to fund Chicago stadium project, and how much it will cost taxpayers

Getting down to the bottom line for a potential bears stadium project in chicago, by alex shapiro • published april 24, 2024.

The Bears announced how they plan to fund a potential new stadium project in Chicago, and how much they believe it will cost.

Bears COO and executive vice president of stadium development Karen Murphy said in a presentation on Wednesday that the team expects the entire stadium project to cost $4.7 billion: $3.2 for the stadium itself and just over $300 million for the infrastructure required to open it, then $1.2 billion for two other phases of development.

Watch NBC Chicago local news and weather for free 24/7

Last month, the team confirmed it would contribute $2 billion dollars to fund the majority of the project. On Wednesday, a slide in the presentation clarified that number would be closer to $2.025 billion dollars. After that, the team would look to an NFL stadium program for a $300 million loan. That leaves a $900 million gap for the stadium financing itself. The Bears plan has them looking to a bond mechanism in the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority program to make up the difference.

Feeling out of the loop? We'll catch you up on the Chicago news you need to know. Sign up for the weekly Chicago Catch-Up newsletter here.

The Bears said a 2% hotel tax that is already in place for the ISFA should be able to make up the $900 million they need from public funds.

There wasn’t a clear answer as to where the team would get the $300 million for the infrastructure, however. Murphy said the team is still working with the state and looking into different funding sources.

More on Bears Stadium

Friends of the Parks responds to Bears' new stadium proposal

7 big takeaways from the Chicago Bears new stadium proposal

If the team gets the public funding needed to open the stadium, they said there will be two more phases of development requiring public money: one to maximize infrastructure for the stadium and surrounding campus totaling $510 million, and another phase for “optional infrastructure to enhance the campus, improve circulation, and maximize public economic benefits,” totaling $665 million. Add up all three phases plus the IFSA funding, and it's nearly $2.4 billion in public money.

Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson said on Wednesday that the Bears’ new plan to build a stadium in Chicago will not raise taxes on city residents.

“I’m going to repeat that one more time to make sure that everybody gets it,” Johnson said after the announcement. “This project will result in no new taxes on the residents of Chicago.”

It's still not clear where some of the funding will come from. Additionally, the Bears indicated they could potentially look for city money as well as state and federal dollars.

The Bears bought 326 acres of land in Arlington Heights last year, and previously announced plans to build a new stadium there. But contentious negotiations about property taxes in the suburbs have become an obstacle for that plan. Earlier this year the team said it was switching its focus away from Arlington Heights back to the city.

Click here to follow the Under Center Podcast.

This article tagged under:

Walmart's CEO, who started on the company's loading docks, shares 3 tips for how to move up the corporate ladder

• CEO Doug McMillon started at Walmart 40 years ago earning $6.50 an hour on the loading docks.
• He told the Stratechery podcast that employees often ask his advice for moving up the ranks.
• McMillon's top tips: do your job well, be a good teammate, and help solve new challenges.

Doug McMillon is a rare phenomenon in modern business.

Not only does his career span a remarkable four decades with the same company, he's on the short list of CEOs who started on the very bottom rung of the corporate ladder.

From earning $6.50 an hour unloading Walmart trucks in 1984, McMillon has spent the past decade in the top job of the largest company in the world.

He now earns over $25 million per year overseeing a global operation of 2.1 million employees, more than 10,000 retail stores, and annual sales of $648 billion.

One question McMillon says he's often asked is how to rise through the ranks like he did.

In an interview with the Stratechery Podcast, he offered three tips:

Do your job well

"Don't take your current job for granted," he said. "The next job doesn't come if you don't do the one you've got well."

Related stories

McMillon said he wrote a memo in the early 1990s asking to work with a division that was exploring how to adapt retail to the internet age.

"The answer that I got back was, 'Go back to work young man. You've got a lot to learn about retail.' So I did and it turned out great," he said.

Help your team

"Be a great teammate — you learn how to lead, you learn how to influence by the way you interact with your peers," he said. "Treat them well, help them, help them do a better job."

McMillon recalled visiting a store in South Dakota during the pandemic in 2020 where the manager had hired 40 bartenders and waiters who had just lost their jobs.

That store manager's decision to hire so many workers in a tough spot ultimately helped the company better fulfill the surge of online orders that followed.

"It was pretty dramatic and I think the team did a fantastic job," McMillon said.

Step up for new challenges

"Volunteer for something extra, volunteer for something hard," McMillon said.

He added that part of why he had opportunities to advance was because he would offer to step in for his boss in meetings while they were traveling or otherwise busy.

"I became a low risk promotion because people had already seen me do the job," he said.

Do you work at Walmart? Contact Dominick Reuter via email or text/call/Signal at 646-768-4750. Responses will be kept confidential, and Business Insider strongly recommends using a personal email and a non-work device when reaching out.

Watch: Marketing leaders from Amazon, LinkedIn, Lego Group and more tell Insider what pandemic-fueled business changes are likely to stick around

• Main content