Teachers who began using a second screen for remote teaching discovered a problem: they wanted to see their presentation on one screen and the Zoom video gallery on the other, but PowerPoint takes up both screens in its default Slide Show type. Zoom’s documentation about sharing PowerPoint presentations does not clearly address this problem.
Here are three different ways to get around PowerPoint Slide Show taking up both screens so that you can have PowerPoint slides on one (shared) screen and the Zoom video gallery on the other. In each case, I recommend practicing this a few times before using it in a class or meeting.
- Use Reading View if available. Check for the Reading View option in the View tab and at the lower right corner of the window (its icon looks like an open book). In Reading View, slides fill the window, you can advance the slide with a click, and you cannot edit the slides. It should work well whether you share the PowerPoint window or an entire screen via Zoom. Reading View is not available in some version of the Mac application or in the enterprise version of PowerPoint Online.
- Change Slide Show type. Before starting the slide show in PowerPoint, click “Set Up Slide Show” in the Slide Show tab, change the Show type option from “Presented by a speaker” to “Browsed by an individual (window)” and click Ok. When you start the slideshow, it will stay inside the PowerPoint window and won’t go full screen. Then you can choose the PowerPoint window when you share your screen to the students via Zoom, so all they will see is the slide, and you’ll be able to see everything else on both screens, including the webcam video gallery. The slide show type option must be changed for each PPT file, so using this method means you must click Set Up Slide Show each time you present a new file to your students.
- Stay in Normal View. Instead of starting the slide show, make the window full screen or maximized on one screen. Hide the ribbon by clicking the selected tab at the top of the window (e.g. Home), and hide notes by clicking Notes at the bottom of the window. Then advance through the slides in Normal view using the slide previews on the left or up and down arrow keys. There are some disadvantages: you cannot click on the slide itself to advance to the next one (clicking it would start editing it); animations are not available in normal view. The main advantage: with this approach you do not have to keep track of the slide show type for each file.
You might also want to activate the dual monitor option in the Zoom app’s General preferences so that Zoom tries to put the video gallery on the screen you are not sharing.
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