Overview
Google Hangouts Meet allows participants to share their entire screen or active windows (i.e. screen share just a PowerPoint to present instead of sharing everything). There are also a few miscellaneous settings that can beneficial for video conferencing.
Instructions
The assumption is that you have already started a Google Hangouts Meet video conference as the host and are ready to share the screen. If this is not the case, then please check out this article.
- To share your screen start by pressing the Present now button in the lower right-hand side of the screen.
- Two Present options will appear.
- Your entire screen: this mode shares everything that is on your screen. Click the gray share button (located in the bottom right of the pop-up window.
- If you have multiple screens connected to the computer, you will be given the option to pick what screen you wish to share.
- Generally, you will only have one screen available to share.
- A window: this mode shares a single application window from anything that is open on your computer (PowerPoint, chrome browser, word document, etc).
- You would find the thing you want to present and then Click the gray share button (located in the bottom right of the pop-up window).
- After you have selected which screen you, Google Meet will change your screen to a blank screen that reads: You're presenting to everyone.
- You can stop presenting by clicking the STOP PRESENTING button in the middle of the screen.
Screen-Within-A-Screen
If you using the presented screen on the same monitor that you are using to present, you will get a visual phenomenon that shows a screen-within a screen-within a screen-etc. (similar to the 2010 movie Inception). This is because you are looking at the screen while Google Hangouts Meet is using it to present at the same time. This causes an infinite loop that can be seen by all participants (this phenomenon occurs in all video conferencing platforms).
To stop this infinite loop, open up a new tab on the screen or "unpin" the presentation screen by clicking on the button in the upper right-hand corner that says:
Presentation (You). You will still be presenting, however, Google Hangouts Meet defaults you back to the blank Presentation screen (open up a new tab or program to present it to the audience).
Miscellaneous Options
Google Meet has several Miscellaneous Options available during the video conference. To access these options, click the three vertical grey dots in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen.
- Change layout: Clicking this allows the user to change the visual layout of the conference. Google Hangouts Meet has an Auto detecting function that will switch layouts based on how many people are in the conference and will switch the main focus to the person who is talking unless you hover over the person's name and click on their icon to put a pin in it.
- When there are only two people in the video conference the default layout is set to Spotlight layout.
- When there are several people Google, Meet will switch to Sidebar layout.
- When lots of people join the video conference Google Meet will switch to Tiled layout.
- To manually choose a layout click on the three vertical grey dots in the lower right-hand corner and choose a layout. The chosen layout will be saved until the layout is changed or until the host ends the meeting.
- Fullscreen: removes desktop and browser items and focuses only on the video conference. To bring everything back hit the Esc key (top left on the keyboard).
- Turn captions on: Google's speech to text dictation will display in the video conference window. It's not 100% accurate.
- Settings: This lets you select your camera, microphone, and speaker settings.
- The second tab is QUALITY: This allows you to select your send and receive the resolution (resolution = picture clarity). On WIFI, it's best to keep lower resolutions, on Ethernet/LAN you can raise the resolutions because the data can transmit faster over Ethernet.
- The picture will not be the low quality with a lower resolution.
- Report a problem: Allows you to send feedback on an issue you are experiencing (user unable to share screen, etc.). You are given the option to share a screenshot of the issue.
- Help: Opens up a new tab to the Google Meet help page. Goes into greater detail of all Google Meet Features.