September 7, 2026 · 6 min read
Live Poll Presenter Controls: What You Can Do Mid-Session
The presenter screen during a live poll: move through the deck, jump to the slide someone asked about, read the connection badge, and end the session well.
Most guides to live polling stop at "click Present live". That is the easy part. The part that decides whether a session goes well is what you do in the next twenty minutes, on a screen a room is watching, usually while you are also talking. Here is everything the presenter screen gives you, and when each of it matters.
Getting everyone in, and keeping the door open
Starting a session puts a 6-digit PIN and a QR code on screen. Both stay there for the whole session, and the QR button in the header blows the code up to fill the screen for a big room. That matters more than it sounds: people arrive late, and a code that vanished after the first slide is the most common reason a room only half participates. You do not have to go back to the lobby to show it again.
Driving the deck
- Prev and Next move through your questions.
- Reveal shows the chart when you are ready, if the deck is set to hide results until you say so. Re-vote clears an estimation round and runs it again.
- Lock stops new answers on the current question without ending anything, useful when you want to talk about a result while it is still on screen.
The keyboard drives all of it too, which is far easier than finding a button mid-sentence: arrow keys or space to move, F for full screen, R to show or hide results.
Jumping to the slide someone just asked about
Somebody puts their hand up about the chart from three questions ago. Jump to slide opens a thumbnail overview of the whole deck; pick any slide and the room goes there. No clicking Next eleven times to get back, and no apologising while you do it.
Tip
Timed quiz and estimation questions show a countdown on the presenter screen as well as on people's phones, sized to be read from the back of a room. If a visible clock makes your audience tense rather than quick, turn it off for that deck in Answering and timing, or hide it for one session from More. People answering keep their own timer either way.
Reading the connection badge
- Live: connected, and what you press reaches the room.
- Reconnecting: the connection dropped and is coming back. It only ever appears after you have been connected once, so it is never the normal state at the start.
- Connecting: the first handshake, before anyone has joined.
This exists because a live session depends on a network in a building you probably do not control. If a control cannot reach the room it is retried automatically over a second channel, and you are told if it still did not get through. Nothing you press fails quietly. On the audience side, an answer given while a phone is offline is held and sent when the signal returns, so walking through a dead spot does not cost somebody their vote.
Ending well
On the last slide the screen offers to end the session, and every way of ending one confirms first: it closes the room for everybody at once, so it should never be a stray tap. The end screen shows the final results, you can share a results image straight from it, and a recap email follows whenever anyone answered. Nothing is lost either way: results, per-person answers and exports all stay in Studio.
Every control on the presenter screen, in order, with what each one does.
Read the presenting guide