Remote Work · Presentation Tips
How to Hide Your Teleprompter While Sharing Your Screen in Zoom
August 10, 2026 · 5 min read
You’ve rehearsed your script, your slides are ready, and you’re about to share your screen in Zoom. But there’s one problem: your teleprompter sitting right there on the desktop, fully visible to everyone in the meeting. Keeping a teleprompter invisible while screen sharing feels like a contradiction—until you know the right techniques.
Whether you’re delivering a live demo, leading a webinar, or recording a walkthrough, a visible script window can break your professional image and distract your audience. The good news? With a few simple adjustments, you can keep your teleprompter completely hidden. Here are five actionable methods you can use today.
1. Choose Window Sharing Instead of Your Entire Desktop
Zoom gives you two primary sharing modes: Entire Screen and Application Window. The choice between them is the single most important decision for hiding a teleprompter.
- Entire Screen captures everything on your monitor—taskbar, desktop icons, and any floating teleprompter window.
- Application Window only shares the specific program you select, such as PowerPoint, Chrome, or Keynote.
By selecting the application window, any teleprompter running in a separate window becomes invisible to viewers. This is the quickest zero-cost solution. Just open your teleprompter, make sure it stays on screen (perhaps as an always-on-top window), and share only your slides or presentation app.
2. Give Your Teleprompter Its Own Display
If your presentation involves switching between multiple apps, window sharing can become cumbersome. A more flexible approach is to physically separate your teleprompter from the content you share.
Connect a second monitor (or even a tablet in extended display mode) and drag the teleprompter onto that screen. Then share only your primary monitor. Zoom allows you to choose which screen to share when using the Entire Screen option. Your audience sees your clean primary display, while you read comfortably from the secondary screen. This also works great with a teleprompter placed on a small USB monitor positioned just below your webcam for more natural eye contact.
3. Float a Transparent Overlay That Zooms Behind
Not everyone has a second monitor, and sometimes you need the teleprompter directly in your line of sight. An always-on-top teleprompter with adjustable transparency can sit right on your main screen—and still remain invisible when using Application Window sharing.
Set your teleprompter to a transparent or semi-transparent window, lock it in place, and then share only your content app. Because Zoom only captures that app’s window, the overlay floats visually for you but is completely excluded from the recording. Some teleprompters even let you remove the window frame and background, leaving only the text. This method gives you a heads-up display without any window clutter reaching your audience.
4. Stop Fidgeting: Use Voice-Controlled Scrolling
Even when the teleprompter window is technically hidden, your cursor movements can betray you. Clicking a scroll button or dragging a scrollbar on an invisible window still shows the mouse jumping around on the shared app—confusing viewers and hinting that something else is open.
A voice-controlled teleprompter eliminates that problem entirely. Apps like VozPilot let you scroll the script hands-free using simple voice commands, so your cursor stays completely still or moves only within the presentation. This keeps the flow seamless and prevents any suspicious cursor activity. Simply speak “scroll down” or set the scrolling speed, and the prompter advances without you touching the mouse.
5. Use OBS Virtual Camera for Surgical Control
For the cleanest result, especially in recorded sessions or high-stakes livestreams, create a virtual camera feed that combines your content elements while excluding the prompter entirely.
Tools like OBS Studio let you build a custom scene containing your slide window, webcam, and other visuals. You then output that scene as a virtual webcam, which you select in Zoom. Because OBS only composites the sources you add, your teleprompter never appears. The prompter runs happily on your actual desktop, and the virtual camera feeds a completely separate view to your meeting. This method requires a few extra minutes of setup but yields the most polished result possible.