Those of you who, like me, have been spending a lot of time on Zoom this year will be familiar with this problem. Someone needs to give a presentation on Zoom. They share their screen, but when they try to advance the slides it works for them, but not for the audience. As far as the audience is concerned, the presentation stays fixed on the first slide.
The easy fix for this is to drop back into edit mode in PowerPoint. It isn’t elegant, but at least your audience can see the slides. Alternatively you can give someone else the slides and ask them to screen share PowerPoint, but that means you have to keep asking them to advance the slides. I was sure that there had to be a better way if only you could find out which of the gazillion settings in Windows or PowerPoint or Zoom would fix it. I think I now have the solution.
In PowerPoint, select the Side Show menu, and click on Set Up Slide Show. That will bring up the dialog box above. Make sure that the first set of radio buttons (Show Type) is set to “Browsed by an individual” rather than to “Presented by a speaker”.
Kevin and I tested that this evening and it seems to work. I’m giving a talk on LGBT+ History on Wednesday evening. Fingers crossed it will work for them too.
When I was little I used to see slide shows somewhere (it was a lonnnnng time ago so I don’t remember where, probably at school). What I do remember — vividly — is the slide advance sound. The audio would come from one place and a mechanical “DING” would sound on the audio track when the slide was to be advanced. You could use some sort of DING generator in your presentation to instruct whoever was screen sharing the slides! (Okay, I’ll go back to lurking…)