Meet – How to present and see the attendees

One of the most common uses of Google Meet is to present something to other people. In this post, we’re going to look at the best way to present. This changed recently with the latest version of Meet and you can now few what you’re presenting AND see who you’re presenting to at the same time. Previously, this wasn’t possible.

There are 3 types of presenting:

1. Sharing your entire screen
2. Sharing an application window
3. Sharing a specific tab in a browser

We’re going to focus on presenting a particular tab in the browser.

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Sharing a tab

This allows you to share a specific tab in your browser, which is usually a specific webpage or a file on your Drive.

Click on the “Present now” icon.

Then choose “A tab”.

This will open a dialogue box with all the tabs open in the browser you also have your Meet one in.

Click on the tab you want to share and click “Share”. For example, here I’m going to share a Google Slides presentation.

Notice at the bottom, that there is the option to share audio. This is on by default, and is one of the main differences from the other sharing options. If you don’t want to share the audio from that tab, uncheck the box.

When you open the tab you’re sharing, you will notice a blue rectangle around it to show it’s being shared.

At the top you will also see a message saying this tab is being shared and the option to stop sharing it.

You and the other attendees will see the content of the tab (in this case the Google Slides presentation) in the main screen with the attendees’ tiles down the right-hand side.

If you are using Google Slides, I would normally click on Present, to enter presentation mode, before sharing so that the slides fill the screen.

As you can see the presentation looks much better.

If you or they hover over the middle of the main screen, you/they have the option of muting the sound from the presentation.

You/they will get a confirmation message to do it. As it says this mutes it for everyone, so do so with care. Only the person sharing can unmute it again.

If it’s muted, you will also see that on your Meet screen that the Presentation audio has been unchecked.

If you want to present a different tab, rather than stopping the presentation and re-presenting something else, you can just go to the new tab and click on “Share this tab instead”.

This will then share that tab with everyone else.

Pros

• You can share sound
• Much cleaner presentation than sharing a window or desktop
• You can see the attendees whilst presenting

Cons

• You have to keep resharing a tab if you change tabs
• You can only share browser tabs and not applications like PowerPoint

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Remember that other attendees can also present, but only one person at a time.

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Closing a Meet by mistake

While you’re moving between tabs whilst presenting, sometimes you close a tab by mistake and that tab could be your Meet session.

But don’t panic! The easiest way is to reopen it from your browser history.

In Chrome, go to the 3 dot menu in the top right-hand corner.

Then click “History” and select the last webpage that was open which will be under “Recently Closed”.

And hey presto! Your Meet will open again and you will just need to rejoin it.

There’s also a convenient keyboard shortcut to do this which is:

Windows: Shift+Ctrl+T

Mac: Shift+Command+T

Press those keys together and the last Chrome tab (your Meet) will open again.

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Stop presenting

You can stop presenting from here by clicking “Stop presenting” in the top-right corner.

At the bottom of the screen you will also see a message informing you that you are sharing you screen and that you can stop sharing it from there.

If the message is in the way, you can either hide it by clicking “Hide” or drag it out of the way.

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