Zoom really needs to make screen sharing with powerpoint more intuitive
Before anyone replies, please note that I personally understand how to navigate this issue and am not asking how to do it - I am merely recommending software improvement
I work in IT classroom/conference/event support at a university, and a big part of my job is helping people set up hybrid meetings in Zoom. I very frequently get asked for help screen sharing powerpoints, as the majority of users I help find the interaction to be very confusing. And indeed, I believe it is unnecessarily cumbersome in 2 major ways -
1. It is not intuitive to most people that they must put the powerpoint in full screen before sharing if they are using presenter mode while the computer is set to duplicate displays - and even if they aren't, people are often inclined to share the window rather than the screen, since they see the option to select powerpoint and think "oh, that's what I want to share." The confusion increases when people switch between powerpoint presentations.
2. When using a remote with powerpoint while screen sharing in zoom, if they click on any zoom controls, it's not obvious that they must then click back on the powerpoint to use the remote again.
While I am not a programmer/developer and don't know how feasible these improvements are, I have some suggestions for the zoom team that seem realistic -
Regarding 1:
- If someone screen shares a powerpoint window and then starts their slideshow, zoom should prompt the user and ask if they would like to share the full screen window (with an option to choose a default action).
- Possibly zoom should list options to screen share entire apps before individual windows, which will always share the most recent window that someone has opened or interacted with for that app
- Honestly zoom should probably just always ask if you want to share the full screen powerpoint when the user goes full screen regardless of what screen they selected, because 99% of the time that's the intended use case if they are trying to use powerpoint while screen sharing.
Regarding 2:
- If someone is clicking keys or pressing buttons on a pointer that would normally be used to advance the slide, if they don't have any function in zoom, then zoom should redirect that input to powerpoint window.
- If the above isn't possible, zoom should at least prompt the user so they understand why their powerpoint isn't advancing, possibly giving the option to make that the active window
To any Zoom employees, thank you for reading and if you think these are great ideas and plan to use them, please consider getting zoom to pay me 😏
