Sharing slides as a Virtual Background

While you can share PowerPoint presentations or share Keynote presentations in meetings, you can also share your presentation as a Virtual Background for an immersive sharing experience. Sharing your slides as a Virtual Background allows your participants to view your video imposed directly on the screen share. It also allows you to manage your presentation directly from within the Zoom meeting controls. 

Note: Sound, transitions, or animations embedded in slides are not supported. 

If the presenter records the meeting locally, the recording will also have the video embedded on top of the slides. If the host or another participant uses cloud recording, the recording will record the slides and video as a normal screen share recording. 

This article covers:

Prerequisites for using virtual background to share a presentation

Presenter requirements

Viewer requirements

Note: If a participant is joining from the Web client, a Zoom Room, or 3rd party endpoint, they will view the slides as a normal screen share, and the presenter's video will not be imposed over the slides. 

How to share a presentation as your background

  1. In the meeting controls toolbar, click Share Screen .
  2. Click Advanced.
  3. Click Slides as Virtual Background.
  4. Browse and select the presentation file.
  5. Click Open.
    Once the presentation is imported, the slides will be shown as your virtual background. If your video is on, by default it will be imposed over the slides.

How to manage slides and video

Once the share has started, you can manage your video and slides from the meeting controls.

Change slides

To navigate through your slides, use the next and previous arrow icons in the meeting controls.

Change video size and position

To reposition or change the size of your video:

  1. Click the ellipses icon ... in the presentation menu.
  2. Click Resize My Video.
  3. Click and hold one of the 4 corners of the image, and drag your mouse to resize the image.
  4. Click and hold the center of your image, then drag your mouse to reposition the image on the slide.

Remove your video from slides

If you want to stop imposing your video on top of the slides and have it sent as a separate video feed:

  1. Click the ellipses icon ... in the presentation menu.
  2. Click Split Video from Slides.
  3. Your participants will now view your slides as a normal screen share and your video feed will be sent as a separate feed. You can still navigate slides in the meeting controls.
  4. To re-impose your video on the slides, click Merge Video and Slides.