Annotation—powered by Microsoft Whiteboard—helps you collaborate on things like a design or presentation while sharing your screen in a Teams meeting.
Turn annotation on while you or someone else are sharing content during a meeting. Presenters can choose to give everyone access to start annotation, or limit access to themselves.
Turn annotation on
- Bring your cursor to the top of the screen you're sharing to surface the presenter toolbar.
- Select Annotate
.
Turn annotation on while someone else presents
- Select Annotate
in your meeting controls.
- Select Request.
Once your request is approved by the presenter, you can annotate on the screen and everyone in the meeting will be able to see your annotations.
Who can annotate
As presenter, you can choose to be the only one who can annotate your shared content, or you can let all participants annotate.
To choose who can annotate:
- Select Settings menu
from the Whiteboard toolset. - Select Everyone can annotate
or Only I can annotate
.
Your setting will be applied immediately.
Interact with background content
While you're annotating your content, you can interact with the background content directly if you're the one presenting.
Scroll through the page, advance through slides, and more on the shared screen.
- To interact with background content, select Start interacting with the background
on your Whiteboard toolset. - To return to annotating, select Stop interacting with the background
on your Whiteboard toolset.
Take a snapshot
Want to look back at the annotations from your Whiteboard session later? Take a snapshot to automatically save the annotations to a Whiteboard file.
To take an annotation snapshot, select Save a snapshot
on your Whiteboard toolset.
To access your Whiteboard files:
- Select View more apps
on the leftmost side of Teams. - Search and select Whiteboard.
- Select Annotations
to see all annotation snapshots.
In the snapshot, you'll be able to see the annotations over the screen that was being shared when the snapshot was taken.
Select annotations to make changes to them. Resize and move them, duplicate them, and more.
Turn off annotation
As the presenter, you can turn off annotation for all participants by selecting Annotate
again from the presenter toolbar.
If you or someone else restarts annotation, the annotations from the previous session will become visible again unless someone clears them.
To clear annotations, select View clear options
> Clear my annotations or Clear my annotations in the annotation toolbar.
Annotation settings
Collaborative cursors
Collaborative cursors show the names of every participant in the meeting by default.
Anyone in the meeting can turn them off. To turn them off:
- Select Settings menu
from the Whiteboard toolset.
- Turn off the Collaborative cursors toggle.