How to Use Presenter View in PowerPoint (Step-by-Step)

How to Use Presenter View in PowerPoint (Zoom, Teams & Dual Monitors)

To use PowerPoint Presenter View, open your slide deck, go to the Slide Show tab on the Ribbon, and tick the Use Presenter View checkbox. Then click From Beginning or press F5. Your audience sees only the current slide on the projector or shared screen. You see the current slide, the next slide, a running timer, and your speaker notes — on your own screen.

That is the three-step answer for someone who has a presentation to give in the next hour. After 24 years of training working professionals in Singapore, I can tell you the people who use Presenter View well are not the ones with the prettiest slides. They are the ones who have set up the room properly before anyone walks in. The rest of this guide covers how to set up dual monitors so Presenter View opens on the right screen, how to write speaker notes you can actually read at a glance, how to present on Microsoft Teams and Zoom (including the one keyboard shortcut that saves you when you only have a laptop), and how to fix the four or five things that go wrong every time.

Course CTA: Learn Presenter View, animations, and slide design hands-on in our WSQ Basic PowerPoint Course — WSQ-funded for eligible Singapore-based participants, SkillsFuture eligible.

What Presenter View actually shows you (and why it changes how you present)

Most guides describe Presenter View as “the screen that shows your notes.” That is technically correct and misses the point. Presenter View is like the dashboard of a car. The road is what your audience sees. The dashboard is what you see — speedometer, fuel gauge, the road sign you are about to pass — and the whole point of a dashboard is that you do not have to take your eyes off the road for very long. Your slide is the road. Your notes, your timer, and your next slide are the dashboard. Drive the car, do not stare at the dashboard.

In Presenter View you see four things at once:

• The current slide — what your audience is looking at right now.
• The next slide — so you can land the bridge sentence into it before you click.
• A running timer — elapsed time since you started, plus the current clock time.
• Your speaker notes — the prompts, numbers, and quotes you wrote into each slide’s Notes pane.

You also get a toolbar with a pen and laser pointer, a thumbnail navigator (jump to any slide), a zoom tool, and a black-screen button (B on the keyboard) that temporarily blanks the audience screen so they look at you, not the slide. Those features matter, but the timer and the next-slide panel are the real reasons to use Presenter View at all. They quietly fix the two things that go wrong in nine out of ten presentations: running over time, and getting blindsided by your own next slide. Your boss notices both.

How to turn on Presenter View in PowerPoint (3-step snippet bait)

Here is the three-step path to use PowerPoint Presenter View. This is the answer if you are about to present and need it working in under a minute.

1. Open your presentation in PowerPoint and click the Slide Show tab on the Ribbon.
2. Tick the Use Presenter View checkbox in the Monitors group.
3. Click From Beginning in the same tab, or press F5.

PowerPoint will start the slideshow with the audience-facing slide on one screen and Presenter View on the other. If both screens show the same thing — Presenter View on the projector, or the slide on your laptop — your displays are set to Duplicate instead of Extend, and the next section is for you.

You can also start from the current slide instead of the beginning by pressing Shift + F5. That one is useful when you are jumping back into a deck mid-rehearsal. The Use Presenter View setting is sticky. PowerPoint remembers it across sessions on the same machine, so once you have ticked it, you do not need to tick it again the next time you open the app. Set it once. Forget it.

Setting up dual monitors so Presenter View works correctly

Presenter View needs two distinct displays — one for the audience, one for you. If your displays are mirrored, both screens show the same picture and Presenter View has nowhere to go. The fix takes ten seconds.

On Windows: press Windows key + P and choose Extend. This treats the projector or external monitor as a second screen rather than a copy of your laptop. You can also reach the same setting via Start → Settings → System → Display → Multiple displays → Extend these displays.

On Mac: open System Settings → Displays, click Arrange, and uncheck Mirror Displays. Drag the displays so their relative positions match where they sit physically on your desk. That stops the mouse cursor from jumping the wrong way when you move it between screens. Small detail. Big difference under pressure.

Once your displays are extended, start the slideshow. If Presenter View opens on the wrong screen and your audience sees your notes, do not panic and do not stop the slideshow. In Presenter View there is a Display Settings button in the top-left toolbar with an option called Swap Presenter View and Slide Show. One click. Screens swap. No one in the audience even noticed.

A separate but related step: in the Slide Show tab, the Monitor dropdown lets you pin Presenter View to a specific display every time. Set it to Automatic for most setups, or pick the display by name if you always present from the same room and want PowerPoint to stop guessing. In our training rooms at Bras Basah we set this manually because the projector is wired in the same way every time, and over a year that has saved us several wrong-screen moments.

Speaker notes: writing notes you can actually read under pressure

This is the part of Presenter View that everyone uses and almost no one prepares for. The speaker notes pane will show whatever you type into the Notes box at the bottom of each slide in Normal View. The question is: what should you actually type?

A few years ago a senior director walked into our office one evening looking for presentation training. We told him we had a public class in two weeks. He needed it sooner. When? Now. Tonight. His firm had submitted a major technical tender and the client wanted to hear the pitch directly from the engineers who would do the work, not from him. The engineers were brilliant technically but tongue-tied. They trembled. They could not get the words out. We coached them for three hours that night — how to stand, where to look, how to pause, and most importantly, how to write speaker notes they could actually use under stage lights. The next day they presented. They won the deal. The notes-writing rules below are the ones I taught them that night.

Here are the rules that work in a real presentation, where you are slightly nervous, the room is warmer than you expected, and the notes pane is showing about six lines of legible 14-point text:

• Put the trigger word first. The first three words of your note should be the cue you need to start talking about that slide. If the slide is about pricing, do not start the note with “As mentioned earlier” — start it with “PRICING — three tiers, anchor on tier two.” When your eyes flick down for half a second, the first three words must do the work.
• Bullet fragments, not paragraphs. A wall of prose forces you to read. Bullet fragments force you to glance and then look up. Three to five fragments per slide is plenty.
• One number per slide, written in full. If a slide rests on a specific statistic, write it out in the notes — exact figure, source, year. You will forget it. Everyone forgets it. The notes are there so you do not have to remember.
• The bridge sentence to the next slide. End each note with the one sentence that takes you to the next slide. This is the single highest-impact thing you can write in a speaker note, because the next-slide panel in Presenter View already tells you what is coming. Your job is to land the transition cleanly.
• Do not write what you will say verbatim. This is the trap. Verbatim notes turn into a script, and a script turns the presenter into a reader. The audience can tell within thirty seconds. Notes are for glancing, not reading.

There is also a font-size button on the Presenter View toolbar — the A^ and Av icons — that grows or shrinks the speaker notes pane on screen. Use it. The default font is too small for most rooms and most eyes, and there is no honour in squinting. Bump it up to a size you can read without bending forward.

If your audience tracks delivery as much as content — and in most professional settings in Singapore they do — pair Presenter View with structured delivery practice. Our Business Presentation Skills Training in Singapore covers the delivery side of the same problem, and the how to make a presentation in PowerPoint guide pairs naturally with this one.

Presenter View in Microsoft Teams

Teams handles Presenter View well, but the setup depends on whether you have one screen or two. Managers can be quite demanding about call quality these days, so it is worth getting this right the first time.

With dual monitors:

1. Open your PowerPoint deck and start the slideshow with Use Presenter View turned on. Presenter View opens on one screen, the audience-facing slide on the other.
2. Start or join your Teams meeting.
3. Click Share in the Teams toolbar and choose Window (not Screen).
4. From the list of open windows, pick the PowerPoint Slide Show window — the one that has only the slide, no notes, no toolbar. Teams shows that window only.
5. Move the Teams meeting controls onto your Presenter View screen so you can mute, unmute, and see the chat without breaking the audience’s view.

With a single monitor:

1. Press ALT + SHIFT + F5 instead of F5 to start the slideshow. Presenter View opens as a normal window, and the audience-facing slide opens as a second window. Both on your one screen.
2. Click Share in Teams and choose Window.
3. Pick the PowerPoint Slide Show window, not the Presenter View window. The audience sees only the slide.
4. The Presenter View window stays visible on your screen alongside the Teams meeting controls.

The most common Teams mistake is sharing the wrong window — sharing Presenter View instead of the slide window, which means your audience sees your notes. Of course they will be unhappy if that happens. The fix is to stop sharing and re-share the correct window. Teams puts a thin coloured border around the window that is currently being shared. Check the border before you start talking.

Presenter View on Zoom (the ALT+SHIFT+F5 single-screen trick)

Zoom is the platform where Presenter View on a single monitor matters most. Many Zoom presenters do not have an external display, and the default behaviour — F5 to start the slideshow — fills the entire screen with the slide, leaving no room for the notes. This is where ALT + SHIFT + F5 saves the presentation.

With dual monitors:

1. Start the slideshow with F5 and Use Presenter View on. Presenter View on your laptop, slide on the external monitor.
2. Start or join your Zoom meeting and click Share Screen.
3. Choose the window that shows the slide (not the Presenter View window). Zoom puts a thin green border around the window currently being shared. Check the green border is around the slide window, not the Presenter View window.
4. Start presenting.

With a single monitor:

1. Press ALT + SHIFT + F5 instead of F5. Presenter View opens as a separate window — not full-screen — alongside the audience-facing slide window. Both fit on your single screen.
2. In Zoom, click Share Screen and pick the PowerPoint Slide Show window. Confirm the green border is around the slide window.
3. Drag the Presenter View window into a corner where you can see your notes and the Zoom meeting controls at the same time.
4. Use ALT + Tab to switch to the Zoom toolbar when you need to mute, unmute, or read chat.

ALT + SHIFT + F5 is the keyboard shortcut that makes the biggest practical difference in this entire article. If you only remember one thing from this guide, remember that one. How good is that?

Microsoft documents the official feature reference for Presenter View on Microsoft Support if you want to cross-check the version-by-version notes.

Presenter View keyboard shortcuts (quick-reference table)

The Presenter View controls are all clickable in the toolbar, but the keyboard shortcuts are faster and look more confident from the audience’s side. Keep this table open on a second tab the first few times you present.

Shortcut	What it does
F5	Start the slideshow from the beginning
Shift + F5	Start the slideshow from the current slide
ALT + Shift + F5	Start Presenter View in a window (single-monitor friendly)
B	Black out the audience screen (press again to resume)
W	White out the audience screen (press again to resume)
Right arrow / Spacebar	Next slide or next animation
Left arrow	Previous slide
Number + Enter	Jump to a specific slide (e.g. 7 Enter goes to slide 7)
Ctrl + P	Switch to pen mode
Ctrl + L	Switch to laser pointer
Ctrl + A	Switch back to arrow / mouse cursor
E	Erase ink annotations on the current slide
ESC	End the slideshow

The two most underused shortcuts on that list are B (black screen) and Number + Enter (jump to slide). B is what you press when the conversation has moved beyond the current slide and you want the audience to look at you instead of a stale graphic. Number + Enter is what you press when someone in the audience asks about slide 14 and you do not want to mash the arrow key thirty times to get there. Smooth. No fuss. Quietly impressive.

When Presenter View doesn’t work (single monitor, mirrored displays, wrong screen)

Four things go wrong, in order of frequency. Each has a one-line fix. I have seen each of these in real training rooms in Singapore over the last 24 years, and the fix is always the same.

1. Both screens show the same picture (or you have only one screen).
Your displays are set to Duplicate, not Extend. Press Windows key + P → Extend (Windows), or System Settings → Displays → uncheck Mirror Displays (Mac). If you genuinely have only one screen — a laptop with no projector — use ALT + SHIFT + F5 to open Presenter View in a window.

2. Presenter View is on the projector, slide is on your laptop.
The screens are swapped. In Presenter View, click Display Settings in the top-left toolbar and choose Swap Presenter View and Slide Show. One click. The audience will not notice.

3. The Use Presenter View checkbox is ticked, but the slideshow still goes full-screen on your laptop.
PowerPoint is defaulting to a single monitor. In the Slide Show tab, find the Monitor dropdown and change it from Automatic to the specific external display by name (it will show up as something like “Display 2” or the projector’s model name).

4. Presenter View opens but the notes pane is empty.
You did not type notes into the Notes box at the bottom of Normal View, or the notes are on a different slide. Press ESC to end the slideshow, switch to View → Notes Page in PowerPoint to see and edit notes one slide at a time, then restart.

If none of these match what you are seeing, the next thing to check is the PowerPoint version. Presenter View requires PowerPoint 2013 or later on Windows and PowerPoint 2016 or later on Mac. Microsoft 365 supports it on every recent version. If you are on a very old build of PowerPoint 2010 or earlier, the feature exists but the shortcut keys and dual-monitor logic behave differently. The simplest fix is to update to a current version, ideally via Microsoft 365. If you are exploring how AI fits into the same workflow, the how to use Copilot in PowerPoint guide covers the speaker-notes generation feature that pairs naturally with Presenter View.

Bringing it together

Presenter View is the single biggest upgrade you can make to how you deliver a PowerPoint presentation, and the setup takes one checkbox and one keyboard shortcut. Tick Use Presenter View in the Slide Show tab, set your displays to Extend, and learn ALT + SHIFT + F5 for the single-monitor days. Write your speaker notes as glance prompts, not scripts. Use B to black the screen when the conversation has moved on, and Display Settings → Swap to fix a wrong-screen mishap without breaking stride.

Confidence is a muscle, not a personality trait. The presenters who look relaxed are the ones who rehearsed. Presenter View gives you the dashboard. The rehearsal gives you the calm hands.

If presenting is part of your work — pitches, training sessions, board updates, lunch-and-learns — pair Presenter View with structured practice. Our trainers are all ACTA or DACE certified, with 20–25+ years of industry and teaching experience, and we have trained 48,000+ working professionals across 12,600+ companies in Singapore since we opened our doors.

Course CTA: Ready to lock in Presenter View, speaker notes, animations, and slide design with a hands-on trainer? Our Word, Excel & PowerPoint with Copilot in Microsoft 365 Office course covers Copilot for PowerPoint alongside Presenter View — three days, hands-on, taught by trainers who have presented in the same meeting rooms you will.

I hope you’ll find this useful. Do try the ALT + SHIFT + F5 shortcut on your next Zoom call. Once you have done it once, you will never go back.