If you want to focus on the speaker during a video meeting, you can enable full-screen mode. In this manner, you can quickly remove other distractions that may sometimes break your concentration.
The bad news is that Microsoft Teams no longer supports full-screen mode. The company removed this feature a few months ago to users’ despair. Let’s see how you can work your way around this limitation.
How to Maximize Microsoft Teams Shared Screen
Zoom the Content
As a quick workaround, you can simply zoom the main Teams window if the app won’t maximize it. Press the CTRL key on your keyboard and hold it down. Then use your mouse wheel and scroll up to zoom in. If you want to zoom out, simply hold down the CTRL key and scroll down.
Enable Focus Mode
Alternatively, you can also turn on Focus mode. Once this option is enabled, Teams automatically hides the carousel of the other meeting participants. In this manner, you can better focus on the screen the speaker is sharing. For example, if you do a lot of code sharing, being able to stretch to full screen makes the code easier to read.
To enable Focus mode, click on More options (the three dots) and select Focus.
Keep in mind that the controls will remain at the top of the screen.
Disable New Meeting Experience
Several users said they somehow managed to bring the full-screen feature back by turning off the new meeting experience option. The success of this method depends on the app version you’re using.
- Click on your Teams profile picture and select Settings.
- Then click on General and go to Application.
- Uncheck the box that says Turn on new meeting experience.
- Log out of your account, exit Teams, relaunch the app and log back in.
You should now see the old UI with the controls on the bottom of the screen. Technically speaking, this is not the standard full-screen mode. For example, your user picture remains visible on the dark gray bar at the bottom of the screen.
Conclusion
While the real full-screen mode is no longer available in Microsoft Teams, you can disable the new meeting experience option or enable Focus mode to work your way around this limitation.
By the way, if you agree that Microsoft should reinstate the real full-screen mode, you can upvote this idea on the Microsoft Teams UserVoice website. The more votes this suggestion gets, the higher the chances Microsoft actually does something about it.
Christof says
The option to disable the “new meeting experience” was unfortunately removed by Microsoft recently