How to hide Teams messages while sharing your screen

If you can share one window instead of your whole screen, do that. The meeting then receives only that window, and Teams, its chats and its pop-ups never reach the call. It costs nothing.

Sharing your whole screen is where it goes wrong, and plenty of calls need it: a demo that moves between apps, a walkthrough, anything where switching what you share mid-call would lose the room. Then two things can show: Teams’ pop-ups, which one Teams setting turns off, and the Teams window itself, sitting open behind your presentation or popped out as a chat.

For the window, protect it: share your entire screen as usual, and it stays open and 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 does not hide its pop-ups during a call on its own. In Teams, open Settings → Notifications and activity and switch off Show notifications during calls and meetings; Microsoft’s own description of that setting is that notifications are shown even while you are in a call. With it off, Teams’ banners stay away for the length of every call.

If a pop-up still could slip through, switch off Show message and content previews in notifications in the same place, so a banner names the sender without quoting the message.

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, and while a protected window is open on your screen they show what is really in it. A minimised one shows its app icon there instead. Do not open Task View while presenting.
• The meeting’s own chat. Microsoft says the Chat button on the presenter toolbar opens a compact chat your audience will not see in your shared screen. We have not tested that from the viewer’s side, so check it from your phone before relying on it.
• 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.