Displaying your screen content to others during a Teams meeting or call for collaboration
A clearer explanation (after discussing this with some coworkers):
TL;DR: When using "Add shared display" or "Use room audio" I'm restricted to only sharing my main display when instead I want to share a different screen.
Let me first preface this that it's a fairly minor problem. It's a nuance for sure, but I have work arounds.
Background:
- I often collaborate with my team in a conference room. I'm using Windows.
- In that room I connect to multiple displays (These are extended displays, not mirror, so they have have different content):
- Screen 1: I have my laptop display.
- Screen 2: I connect to a monitor that's on the table. Each person has their own monitor as it's a collaboration space. I consider this my personal screen.
- Screen 2: I use USB C to connect to a TV that's in the room. It's treated a normal monitor. No special wireless or Cisco or Microsoft fancy connections here. This TV is visible by my whole team (except those that happen to be remote that day). I typically put the MS Teams window up on that screen.
- When a remote person is is talking, we can all seem them on the shared TV.
- When anyone shares content, we can see their screen up on the TV.
- This works pretty well.
The downside to this setup:
- It's minor, but I need to use options of View -> "Full screen" and View -> "Focus on content" to try to make shared data as big as possible. But still a lot of the screen is wasted on things like my personal mute button and other controls etc.
- Also, when I want to share content, MS Teams allows me to use any screen (it shows all three as options) but when sharing the MS Teams screen disappears such that it's no longer shown on the TV.
- To work around this, I instead move my content (say a Powerpoint presentation) to the TV, then share the TV. Then everyone can see it together.
- I'd rather share it from my external monitor, since it's a bit closer to me, but this isn't all that bad.
Enter "Add shared display":
- Recently I noticed that MS Teams has an option "Add shared display" so I tried it out.
- It now creates a separate window that doesn't have my personal controls. Yay! I put that up on the screen instead. This works great when others are sharing.
- However, when I want to share, I'd either want to share the TV screen (like I did before) or, even better, share from my external monitor. But MS Teams does not allow that.
- For no good reason, in this mode, MS Teams now restricts to be able to share ONLY my laptop screen. This is where I have my window task bar, where I have my email, where I have Slack notifications. I don't want to share this screen.
- The "bug" I'm trying to report (or perhaps an enhancement request) is to allow sharing ANY of my three screens even when I'm in the "Add shared display" mode. MS Teams doesn't know which of my three monitors is being shared in the room, so it should let me choose which one to share.