Improve your meetings with these recent tricks Teams can do! + PowerPoint Cameo

Some tricks and knowledge is always to keep in the bag for those situations where you are presenting or attending meetings. With upcoming Teams Nation Community Conference on March 23rd 2022, which is a free community event btw – please register in, you surely want to learn about few things that will make your meeting experience a better one.

Attending a meeting

Ctrl + Space will unmute you if you have your focus on Teams window. This will make it easier to drop in a few quick comments without having to navigate to the unmute button or using Ctrl+Shift+M to toggle mute/unmute. You are going to be unmuted as long as you keep Ctrl + Space pressed and will be going to the mute when released.
Mirror my video is changing how you see your own video. This doesn’t affect how others see it. It may be easier to mirror my video if you have text in your video background. So instead of making the image with text mirrored (do not do that or others see it mirrored!) just flip this switch on and you see it the right way as well.
Hide my video. I don’t always (never?) want to see my own video when attending a meeting or event. Hiding lets others see the video normally, but hides it from my view.
Attending via Web-Teams? You can turn on and see Live Captions as well – and change your video background too!
Mute notifications during meeting. Yes, you may want to mute notifications so you don’t get distracted and multi task. You can set this in settings or toggle during the meeting. I recommend putting it on in settings so it is on by default.

Presenting or moderating a meeting

People ask questions in meetings. There is a Raise Hand -feature to make it easier to manage. Did you know that it now preserves the order on which hands were raised? Who raised their hand first, is on the top. Makes it easy to take questions in the order.
Mirror my video – when you present something with your camera you may want it to appear normal to you as well – that is “unmirrored”. The default is mirrored picture – just like we would be in front of a real mirror – but you can change this. This only affects your preview picture. Attendees are always seeing your video normally.
Pin my video: you can pin your own video to your screen (if you want to pin it to others use Spotlight -feature) .
Hide my video. This will hide your video to be visible for you. This doesn’t affect others – if you want to hide your video from others turn off your camera. I use this when presenting so I don’t have to see myself talking .
Music Mode “HiFi -mode” lets you have better audio than normally. This also disables noise cancellation, so when you play music others will be hearing it without being cancelled. Teams will be getting automatic music detection mode later this Spring (April if roadmap allows it)
Mute notifications during meeting. Yes, you may want to mute notifications so you don’t get distracted when presenting – notifications can cause confusion if left on. You can set this in settings or toggle during the meeting. If you present often just turn them off.
Use Presenter Modes

You can share your content and you video on the screen at the same time – Either on top of the content (Standout), next to it ( Side-by-side) or you can use the Reporter-mode where the content are is slightly smaller and elevated compared to the side-by-side mode. Don’t forget you can choose background that is used. No, you can not add your own.

If you are using PowerPoint Live to present your PowerPoint then , at the moment at least, you can only use Standout -mode or do Teams meeting in the usual way.

PowerPoint Cameo

If you are using Office insider version, then you have already access to PowerPoint Cameo. You can use it only in the PowerPoint Desktop version, so you can’t take benefit of Cameo in PowerPoint Live or web. Yet. But if you share your screen you can use PowerPoint Cameo with Teams meeting. Some word of advice: when I used this in a webinar people said it took quite a hit in the performance. Sharing videos (after all, Cameo is a kind of video) via Teams meeting desktop sharing isn’t optimal. But it can create very interesting presentations and also I am sure the performance will improve over time – after all Insider is a preview/beta -version. Cameo is of course ideal if you use PowerPoint Recorder to record the video and use Cameo on slides to bring out your video image.

Adding Cameo to your slides is easy, go to Insert-tab and if you have the Insider-version in use and updated you should see Cameo on the right.

After that you have the free creativity at your disposal. Originally Cameo video will be on bottom-right corner but you can move it anywhere you want to. You can use depth (front/back), shapes and other formatting to have the video look like you want to. However – you can not change the background. At least not yet.

First choose the right camera into use – if you have more than one. Selection can be found under Preview-feature.

You can use the Preview-button to turn on preview any time.

You can change camera shape from Styles or dropping down Camera Shares-menu.

And there are settings for borders and effects as well.

Let’s try Cameo on.

I changed my background with XSplit VCam -app, which has a funny quirk that it appears upside down in PowerPoint Cameo. Well – there is a rotate functionality so it isn’t that bad.

And yes – you can move objects front and back to put the Cameo to any level you like to.

And I have to say it looks cool to be in the Cloud.

Since Cameo is a PowerPoint object you can take advantage of Slide Transitions if you want to – Morph looks quite good there when you are embedded inside the presentation.