Up your presentation game in Teams (Cameo)

Simple tools to up your game in Teams presentations, here are some quick tips and tricks that I use when holding presentations in Teams.

This first option has been around a while, and its called Standout. It will increase your interaction with the participants if they can see your expressions during your presentation.

It is quick to activate during a presentation, but doesn’t allow any customization. Also, I don’t like how it attempts to hide my background. It doesn’t a perfect job at it, which annoys me a little bit.

Now lets level up your interaction even more with some preparation and the use of Cameo to place your camera nicely in your slides, like this:

Standout used to be a feature in Teams, but yesterday it was gone. While waiting for attendees I searched aorund, where had it gone? Then I stumble upon a preview feature called Cameo, and a how to enable this preview feature:

On Windows, elevate your commandline and run these:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun>OfficeC2RClient.exe /changesetting Channel=BetaChannel

C:\Program Files\Common Files\microsoft shared\ClickToRun>OfficeC2RClient.exe /update user

After making the changes, it will update your Office Software and needs to restart the Office Applications, including Teams. Thanks to Ragnar Hell over at Ragnarhell.com for blogging about it to.

How to use Cameo in your presentation?

Once you finished previous steps it will appear as a Camera under “Insert” menu in PowerPoint.

You can insert multiple cameos, allthough I don’t know if we can have different cameras feeding the different cameos in your presentation. Why do you think we can have multiple cameos? Wonder if we could have other participants co-presenting in their own cameo..

Be sure to add your cameo in every slide you want to embed your camera. It might not be room in every slide, and it can fit different places depending on your slide content.

By using the format tab for Cameo we can make changes to how the camera is presented, like shown above we change the shape and effects surrounding camera. We can also crop the camera if we your fitting to far away from the camera.

It also supports adding background, but from Teams. Which is quite interesting how the feed is placed on slides in PowerPoint and we can add features to it when meeting in Teams.

And this is the view of the presenters view when using the Present in Teams from PowerPoint, or if you go to share your screen, but chose to share a specific PowerPoint slide.

But if you chose to share you screen, or perhaps just an application, we cant have our camera in front. This was the feature I was missing earlier, but upon installing Cameo, they have appeared again.

Play around with them, and figure out when you find them appropriate. You can change them while your presenting by hovering your mouse on top of your screen, and the small iphone-bus-stop-area will give you the option to change between presenting modes.