How to use 'PowerPoint Live Presentations' for inclusive and engaging presentations

Live Presentations in PowerPoint

Using PowerPoint for Web, you will be able to engage every participant with the new Live Presentations feature. You can present slides and using a QR code or short link, viewers can join and follow along with live subtitles in more than 60 languages on their personal device, making it easy to present to a large group of people who might speak different languages. All this also works perfectly when viewed from a mobile device!

The feature also includes live reactions and a survey for participants that generates an email to the presenter with the aggregated audience feedback and corresponding recommendations, offering insights to improve future presentations and trainings.

Starting a PowerPoint live presentation

Before your presentation (either in real life, or in a Teams meeting), open your presentation in PowerPoint on the web, and click on the 'Slideshow' menu item. When opening the 'Present Live' menu item, you can configure that only people in your organization can access the presentation (which means that everybody needs to login with their Centric credentials before seeing the content), or that anyone is allowed to view the content.

By opening the 'Always Use subtitles' menu item you can select the spoken language (unfortunately, Dutch is currently not an option), and you can select the default subtitle language which will be displayed on screen during the presentation, when viewers have joined the presentation from their own device, they can override the subtitle language if they want to have the subtitles translated to their own language).

During the Live Presentation

By clicking on 'Present Live' your presentation is started, and a start screen will be displayed. This screen displays a QR code that people use to open the presentation in a web browser on their own device. They can also join by opening the join URL in a web browser manually. Once somebody joins the presentation, the counter on the screen is updated. During the presentation, the join URL is displayed at the top of the presenter's screen. At the bottom of the presenters screen, a transcript of the spoken text is displayed.

People that have joined the presentation will see a similar screen on their own device. The transcript of the spoken text is displayed at the right-hand side of the screen. Using the 'language' button at the bottom another language can be selected, the transcribed text will then be automatically translated into that language.

By clicking on the '...' menu item in the lower right corner, a viewer can rate the presentation, and can leave additional comments.

During the presentation viewers can also look back at previous slides using the controls in the lower left corner. They will not be able to look at slides that the presenter hasn't displayed yet.

After the presenter has shown the last presentation slide, all joined viewers will see a popup asking them to rate the presentation session in general, and asks for a rating on slide design, speaker skill, content and interaction with audience. Viewers can also leave some additional comments.

Make sure NOT to end the presentation session within PowerPoint right away, as that will deactivate the session for the viewers, and will they no longer be able to send their feedback.

When viewers have had enough time to give feedback, you can end the session. The link and QR code to the presentation session will then automatically expire.

After the Live Presentation

When the live presentation has finished, the presenter will receive an automated email message. This message displays an overview of the score your presentation has been given by the attendees, the additional comments they have left, and possible also some tips on how to improve for your next presentation.

At the bottom of the email a link is added through which you can see the poll responses in more detail, and even download an excel file with all information.

Note: You can save the aggregated feedback email in your inbox, but the audience feedback in Microsoft Forms isn’t kept indefinitely. If you want to keep the detailed feedback, go to the feedback form, select 'Open in Excel', and save the resulting Excel file.

Using this new 'Live Presentation' feature you can give more involving presentations, which is especially great when doing a real-life presentation during an event, but can also be used during a Teams meeting where the presenter can share his screen (which displays the presentation with the subtitles to all meeting attendees), and attendees can open the presentation in a separate browser window for better viewing and to be able to give feedback during or after the presentation.