If you’ve ever wondered how news anchors or public speakers can stay on point and present
a teleprompter. If you’re not used to using a teleprompter, with a little practice reading to
your camera, a teleprompter can help get your presentations or speeches to the next level.
In today’s work from home tip, I’ll show you how you can use Microsoft Word
to easily convert any document into something that works perfectly as a teleprompter, then
I’ll show you how to use Microsoft Teams as a way to project this teleprompter screen to a remote
presenter or a second device like a phone screen that can be placed directly under your camera so
that your eyes stay close to the camera lens. In my case, I’m using Microsoft Word and what I’ll
demonstrate today works more or less in the same way whether you’re using a PC or a Mac.
Here I have the script that I’m presenting from right now and the first thing you’ll want to do in
the View tab is change the view from Print Layout to Web Layout. This ensures that you can use the
full width of the page and not need to scroll past page breaks – which can often appear mid-sentence.
The next thing you can do is disable the ruler on the top of the screen by unchecking this box.
You can leave the page background white like mine is now – which is helpful if you’re using the
screen to help with your camera lighting, but depending on your screen brightness or setup,
the white background can make you too bright, or if you’re using an actual teleprompter device on
your camera that works like a two-way mirror, the white background sometimes can cause the image to
like a little foggy. To counter these affects, you can easily change the background to black.
To change the background color, first you’ll want to select all of your text
using CRTL+A and go to the Home tab to make sure your font color is set to “Automatic�
– this ensures that your font color will flip to white once we change the Page Color to black.
To do that, just search in Word in the search box for “Page Color” and set it to black.
Now our document is looking much more like a teleprompter, but the font is still pretty
small and if you’re camera is far away or going to project this onto a small screen,
then you’ll want to make the font larger and you can do that using the zoom control in the bottom
right corner to get to a comfortable font size. The last thing and a key step, you’ll want to do
in Word is switch on Focus mode, this will full screen Word and really make it look
like a teleprompter – and now it’s ready to go. But let’s say we want to use this for a two-person
presentation and want to get the attention of each speaker or punch various parts of the script.
For that, you can use highlighting in Word to help grab attention.
For example, if I’m presenting with Megan, I can mark her name
Megan: and my name
Jeremy: With different colors, or I can bold and
underline text if I want really land a point. Ok, so now I have my prompter complete,
but another key aspect to doing this well is getting the screen with Word be as close
as possible to the camera if your just using a camera on top of your monitor or laptop, you’ll
be looking pretty far down to read your text. In my case, I have a device called a Padcaster
attached to my Sony A7 DSLR camera lens and under it, there is a five and a half inch field monitor
used as a second display over HDMI on my PC with the display flipped so the text reads
the correct way and the text is directly in front of the lens – this how you would
use Word in a studio environment to drive the display under a larger teleprompter.
Chances are you don’t have that set up at home and if you want something like that,
I’ve put the links in the description below to everything I’m using to record this video.
Something you probably do have is a mobile phone that can run Microsoft Teams or Skype and you
can use screen sharing to project your script in Word both to your phone if you’re presenting solo,
as well as to a remote co-presenter using their phone or monitor to display your
script in real-time, even as you scroll. The phone screen has two benefits – it’s not too
wide or too tall in landscape orientation – so your eyes won’t be visibly moving much left to right
and you can mount it either just below or behind the camera, so your eyes stay with your audience.
To “mount” your phone, the best option is to use a mini tripod with a phone holder,
or taping it just below the camera to your monitor also works in a pinch.
Now let’s say this is a larger live presentation that you’re presenting over Microsoft Teams
and don’t want people who are not presenting to see your teleprompter screen or that you’re
reading from it, a nice trick you can use is to join the main meeting or webinar using the
Teams app on your PC or Mac and a second meeting for the teleprompter using the Teams mobile app
on your phone or the Teams web client that you can get to at teams.microsoft.com.
This is also the way your co-presenter – if you have one – will be able to join the main
Teams meeting and see your teleprompter on the second Teams meeting as you scroll it so they
can easily follow along and not miss their cues. Another tip when using the Teams web
client is to resize the window to make it smaller and place it as close as possible to the camera.
Now you’re ready to go, but if this is the first time trying out any of these tips, I’d recommend
setting everything up and testing things in advance before running your meeting or webinar.
So those were two tips you can use when every word matters, whether you’re presenting on your own
to record a video like this one or on a larger Teams call or webinar.
To find more tips like this on Microsoft Mechanics, check out aka.ms/WFHMechanics,
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