How to hide Teams messages while sharing your screen

Teams hides its own notification banners while you present, which handles the obvious case. What it does not handle is the Teams window itself sitting open behind your presentation, a popped-out chat in its own window, or anything arriving from an app that is not Teams.

For those, protect the window: mark it as excluded from capture, share your entire screen, and it stays readable to you while viewers get an opaque privacy screen where it is.

Start with what Teams gives you

Do this first, because it is free and it is where the common case is handled.

Teams suppresses incoming chat banners while you are sharing. If yours are still appearing, check Settings → Notifications and activity, and confirm you are actually sharing rather than in a call without a share running.

Then add the Windows-level setting, because Teams cannot silence anything that is not Teams:

• Windows 11: Settings → System → Notifications → Do not disturb.
• Windows 10: Settings → System → Focus assist → Alarms only.

Between them, banners are handled. What is left is windows.

Protecting the Teams window

1. Download Hushglass and run the installer — user-account install, no administrator prompt.
2. Open the Teams window you want private. If it is a specific conversation, pop it out into its own window first: hover the chat in the list, choose Pop out chat. A popped-out chat is a real window, which is what makes this work at conversation level rather than app level.
3. Open Hushglass, find the window under ACTIVE WINDOWS, and click Refresh list if it is not there — the list does not update on its own.
4. Click the row, then Protect. The STATUS cell becomes a green Protected chip.
5. Share your entire screen in your meeting, not a single window. Sharing the protected window itself hands its pixels straight to the meeting app and nothing can get in between.

Ctrl+Shift+Q protects whichever window you are working in, from anywhere — which is the version you will actually use when a conversation you did not expect becomes the one you need covered.

On Pro, other windows the same app opens are picked up automatically. That matters more with Teams than with most apps, because Teams opens a lot of windows: popped-out chats, meeting windows, separate call windows. On the free tier you protect one at a time.

The desktop app and the browser tab are not the same

Our viewer-side testing on 2026-08-16 covered the Teams desktop client, sharing an entire screen, with a second device joined as the viewer.

Teams in a browser tab was not tested, and we are not going to imply it behaves the same. Two reasons to treat it separately:

• It is a different capture path, and until somebody checks it on a viewer’s screen it is an assumption.
• A tab is not a window. Protecting the browser covers every tab inside it, which is rarely what you want when the browser is also the thing you are presenting.

If you use Teams in a browser and want this, install it as an app so it gets its own window — in Edge, ⋯ → Apps → Install this site as an app; in Chrome, ⋮ → Cast, save and share → Install page as app.

What viewers see

An opaque privacy screen where the window is, with a small line naming the tool. Not a blur of your messages — a blur is still your content, and meeting bitrates do unpredictable things to blurred text. You keep reading and replying normally.

What this does not cover

• Task View, Alt-Tab and taskbar previews draw their own thumbnails, outside any application’s control. Do not open Task View while presenting.
• Teams’ own in-meeting chat panel is part of the Teams meeting window you are presenting from, not a separate window to protect. Close the panel if you do not want it seen.
• Hardware capture — a capture card or a phone camera reads the monitor itself.
• Whole windows only. Popping a chat out is the way to get conversation-level control.

Verify before you need it

Join a meeting from your phone, protect a Teams window on your PC, share your entire screen, and look at the phone. Not at Teams’ own preview on your machine — that is generated by the computer that already knows the answer you want.

One minute, once. Hushglass is free for one protected window, on Windows 10 version 2004 or later.