How to Share a Single Application Window Instead of Your Entire Screen in Microsoft Teams

During remote team meetings, client presentations, and training workshops in Microsoft Teams, sharing your screen is the most effective way to walk colleagues through data, slides, and workflows. However, sharing your entire desktop display introduces significant privacy and confidentiality hazards: incoming personal emails, WhatsApp desktop notifications, sensitive bookmarks, confidential financial spreadsheets, and messy desktop files can all be inadvertently broadcast to everyone on the call. Choosing to share only an individual application window confines the meeting broadcast exclusively to the software you want attendees to see.

The Critical Differences Between Sharing a Screen and Sharing a Window

When you click the Share button in Microsoft Teams, the sharing tray presents two distinct presentation modes:

• Screen (Desktop) Sharing: Broadcasts everything currently visible on your selected monitor. If you switch between applications, open a browser tab to check an email, or receive a toast notification in the corner of your screen, meeting participants see every pixel in real time.
• Window Sharing: Restricts the video feed strictly to the borders of one specific application program (such as Microsoft Excel, a PowerPoint slide deck, or a specific browser instance). Even if you drag another window over the top of the shared app or switch to your email on the same monitor, attendees see only the designated application window.

Steps to Share a Specific Application Window in Microsoft Teams

Selecting and broadcasting a single window on Windows or Mac takes only a moment:

1. Ensure the application you intend to present (such as Word, Excel, or Chrome) is actively open and not minimised to your taskbar or Dock.
2. Join your meeting in the Microsoft Teams desktop application.
3. Click the Share button (represented by an upward-pointing arrow inside a rectangle) located in the upper-right meeting toolbar.
4. In the sharing panel that opens, look beneath the Screen section to locate the Window section.
5. Teams displays visual thumbnail previews of every active application currently running on your computer.
6. Click directly on the thumbnail of the specific application you wish to present.

Teams places a distinct thin red border around the selected application window, confirming visually that only the contents inside that red boundary are being transmitted to meeting participants.

Including Computer Audio with a Single Window

If the window you are sharing contains a video clip, product demonstration, or audio playback that attendees need to hear:

1. Before clicking on your target window in the Share tray, locate the toggle switch at the top labelled Include computer sound.
2. Switch the toggle to the On position.
3. Select your application window. Audio generated by that application will now stream directly through Teams in high fidelity without requiring your room microphone to pick up laptop speaker sound.

Managing Privacy and Multitasking While Presenting a Window

Window sharing delivers unparalleled multitasking freedom during long calls:

• Covering the Shared Window: If you open your meeting notes or check a chat message directly on top of the shared Excel spreadsheet, attendees will not see your notes. The Teams sharing pipeline captures the window buffer directly from the operating system, filtering out any overlapping dialogue boxes or windows.
• Do Not Minimise: While you can cover the shared window with another program, you must not minimise the window to the taskbar. Minimising an application signals to the operating system to pause its graphical rendering, which causes Teams to pause the presentation and display a blank screen to participants until you restore the window.
• Stopping the Share: When your presentation concludes, click the Stop sharing button located on the floating presenter toolbar at the top of your screen.

Adopting window-specific sharing in Microsoft Teams protects your digital privacy, prevents embarrassing notification pop-ups, and keeps your meetings focused strictly on the professional content at hand.