When you’re giving a PowerPoint presentation, you always want to make sure you have the latest updates to the slides available. Not only because you want to make sure you’re presenting the newest and most correct information, but because once you start the presentation, you’re unable to make changes on the fly. That is now changing as there’s a new feature in PowerPoint that allows you now have slides updated by your team on the fly, even when the presentation is in Slide Show mode.

You can have changes made by your team synchronize changes either automatically or manually.

Automatic Updates: To have your slide show updated on the fly, click on the “Slide Show” tab and check the box for “Keep Slides Updated.”

Start your presentation by selecting the appropriate button on the Slide Show tab, and whenever an update is made and detected, the content is automatically updated and visible in your live slide show.

Manual Updates: If you as a presenter want a bit more control over things and doesn’t want to be surprised, you can have manual slide updates. Make sure the above box is unchecked, and start your presentation as normal. Whenever and update to a slide is made, an “Update Slides” button will appear in your presenter view:

Clicking on “Update Slides” will manually synchronize the content.

So how could this feature be handy?

• During a slide show with multiple presenters, fix a typo or make some edits while others are presenting.
• When running a meeting with a slide show where interactivity is key, you can ask the meeting participants to add questions directly to a slide to encourage collaboration.

Note: Like many of Microsoft’s collaboration features, this feature requires that the PowerPoint file itself must be stored on either OneDrive or SharePoint.