Embed your Poll into a PowerPoint Presentation

What it does

The DirectPoll add-in puts a live DirectPoll result screen on top of your PowerPoint slides, and lets your deck drive the poll as you move through it. No macros, no special tools – a plain .pptx that still opens correctly anywhere, with or without DirectPoll installed.

Two things happen during a slideshow:

• a transparent overlay draws a DirectPoll result screen on top of your slide, and
• as you move through the deck, DirectPoll shows the right result and (optionally) drives the live poll – stops it, moves it to a question, reveals answers – so the projector shows your PowerPoint deck while the poll follows your slides.

You are not left guessing what a slide will do, either: while you edit a deck, DirectPoll tells you what each result will do when you present it, and while you present the deck, it shows the same on your presenter screen.

Two ways to get there

Which one you want decides how much of this page you need:

1. Start from the provided deck. Your poll generates a ready-made presentation – download it and it works. Restyle it, drop slides, or copy its DirectPoll shapes into a deck of your own. This is the usual way, and it needs nothing from the rest of this page.
2. Build a result slide yourself. A rectangle, a name and a link in its Alt Text – for slides the generator does not produce, or a deck you are building from scratch.

Install it

The decks are platform-independent: build a deck on either platform and present it on either. What you install, and a few details around it, differ.

	Windows	macOS
Installation details	PowerPoint on Windows	PowerPoint on macOS
What you install	An add-in, directly into PowerPoint	A companion app that runs alongside PowerPoint
Permissions	None – it installs under your user profile	Two macOS privacy permissions, granted once
Where your links are read from	Live from PowerPoint	From the saved .pptx – so save after editing markers or inserting / deleting slides
While editing	Marks on the slide, over each marker	A floating marker panel beside or on the PowerPoint window
While presenting	A floating presenter panel inside PowerPoint's Presenter View	A floating presenter panel on the presenter's screen, when Presenter View is on
Downloaded decks	Click Enable Editing to leave Protected View	Nothing to do
Get the add-in	Windows	macOS

Whichever platform you present from, you also need:

1. A DirectPoll poll, created and saved, with at least one question.
2. For the transparent look, the poll's theme set to Light · clear or Dark · clear in the cockpit – or a Custom theme with a transparent background. A solid theme shows the poll's own opaque background instead of your slide.
3. Internet access to directpoll.com on the presenting machine – the results are live, so the machine you present from has to reach the poll.

Keep it up to date

DirectPoll looks for a new version regularly and downloads nothing until you ask it to. When an update is available you are told, and you always see which version it is and how big the download will be.

That size is worth a glance before you press. Most updates are a small patch of a few hundred kilobytes; now and then one has to replace the whole program and runs to a couple of hundred megabytes. You can stop a download while it is running, and nothing is installed if you do.

This is deliberate: nobody should meet an unexpected download on a conference center's wifi an hour before presenting. An update never interrupts a presentation either – nothing is fetched or installed behind your back while you are presenting, and the version you are running never changes in the middle of a show.

Where an available update is shown, and when an installed one takes effect, are different on each platform: see PowerPoint on Windows or PowerPoint on macOS.

Start from the provided deck

The quickest way to a working deck is not to build one. In the cockpit, go to the Present in PowerPoint section and click Get slide deck: you get a plain .pptx with one result slide per question, already carrying the right link for each, plus a short "About this slide deck" slide explaining what is in it. Present it as it is, and it works.

Few people do present it as it comes, and it is built to be taken apart:

• Restyle, reorder, delete. It is an ordinary presentation – apply your own theme, drop the questions you are not asking, put your own slides between the result slides.
• Move or resize the DirectPoll rectangle on a slide and the results follow it: where the rectangle sits is where they appear, and how big it is, is how big they are.
• Copy a DirectPoll shape into a deck of your own. Copy and paste carries its name and its Alt Text with it, which is everything that makes it work.

Only if you want a slide the provided deck does not contain you need to Build a result slide yourself.

While you edit

While you work on a deck, DirectPoll tells you what each DirectPoll shape will do when you present – and flags the ones that will not work. It is the quickest way to catch a bad Alt Text before you are standing in front of an audience. This info is not part of the presentation: your .pptx is never changed by DirectPoll.

The wording is the same everywhere, including in the panel you see while presenting: first what the marker targets – e.g. Question 2, or QR code (join screen) – then what it does when the slide comes up:

• start – moves the live poll to that question and opens voting.
• reveal – marks the correct answers for everyone, and closes voting.
• reveal (view only) – the same marking, but on your slide only: the live poll is left running and untouched. This is &reveal without &action, which usually means &action was forgotten.
• stop – stops the poll. Only the QR code (join screen) does this.

No verb means the slide only displays: it shows that question's result and leaves the poll alone. A plain result link, which just follows the live poll, reads result screen. The table below gives the link ending for each of these.

A marker that cannot work is flagged instead: no link (nothing in the Alt Text), not a link or blocked link. Two more mistakes only show up once a slide is looked at as a whole, and are flagged too: several links on one slide driving the same poll, where the last one to load wins, and more DirectPoll shapes on a slide than can be shown at once.

How this is shown is where the platforms differ – directly on the slide, or in a panel beside it: see Windows or macOS.

While you present

During a slideshow, DirectPoll can show a small panel on your own screen listing what the current slide is showing and what the next one will – so a mistake on the slide you are about to reach is something you find before the audience does. The audience never sees it, and it never changes what they do see: it is an aid, not part of the presentation.

It lists one row per DirectPoll shape, in the same words as the marks you saw while editing – what the marker targets, then what it does when the slide comes up. A slide carrying no DirectPoll shape says so rather than showing nothing, and past the last slide the second list reads end of show. A marker with a problem – a missing, malformed or blocked link – is flagged in red, which is the whole point of the "coming up" half.

Where the panel appears, and how you switch it on and off, differ per platform: see Windows or macOS.

You do not have to clean anything up afterwards: the results close themselves when the slideshow ends, and within a second or two if PowerPoint is closed or crashes – they never linger on screen. They are gone on PowerPoint's black End of show screen too, which is what you want.

Build a result slide yourself

Everything above rests on one idea, and this is where you do it by hand. A result is a rectangle named DirectPoll, and two things about it matter:

• where you draw the rectangle = where the results appear, and how big;
• the rectangle's Alt Text = the DirectPoll link that says which result to show and what to do to the poll.

Get a result link

Each result slide needs at least one DirectPoll link – one per DirectPoll shape on it. The easiest way:

1. Open the poll in the cockpit and expand Advanced links – look for "Result links per question".
2. Pick the question – or the QR code (join screen) – in the Show dropdown, and set the Reveal answers and Move the live poll here toggles as you want them for that slide.
3. Copy the presentation link it shows. That's the whole value – it already contains the question and options.

It has to be a DirectPoll link. Only https links to directpoll.com and its subdomains are loaded – that is a security rule, not a setting. Anything else is flagged blocked link while you edit, and during the show that slide gets a short error page instead of your results. Plain http counts as blocked too, so keep the https the cockpit gives you.

You can also assemble a link by hand from the poll's Result link:

<Result link>&question=<N>&reveal&action

• question=<N> – which question. 1..N for a question, or 0 for the QR code (join screen).
• reveal – include it to mark the correct answers (and reveal hidden labels). Leave it out to just show the result. On its own it marks them on your slide only; together with action it reveals them for everyone and closes voting.
• action – include it to drive the live poll (move it to this question; with question=0, stop it). Leave it out to just display without touching the poll.

Goal on this slide	Link ending
QR code (join screen), don't touch the poll	&question=0
Stop the poll and show the QR code (join screen)	&question=0&action
Open voting on question 3 (move the poll there)	&question=3&action
Reveal question 3's correct answers to everyone (closes voting)	&question=3&reveal&action
Just display question 2's result (leave the poll be)	&question=2
The same, with the correct answers marked on your slide only	&question=2&reveal
Follow the live poll, and keep hand control (see below)	nothing – the plain Result link

Two of those look alike and are not: &reveal&action reveals the answers for everyone and closes voting, while &reveal on its own marks them on your slide only and leaves the poll running. The generated deck always uses the first.

Build the slide

On a slide where you want poll results:

1. Insert → Shapes → Rectangle, and draw it where the results should appear, at the size you want. Full-slide for big results, a small box for a corner widget.
   Any shape will do – DirectPoll uses its bounding rectangle, so the results fill the box the shape occupies, whatever its outline. A rectangle is simply the shape whose bounding box is the shape.
2. Style it however you like. Whatever you give the shape stays visible behind the transparent results, so its fill becomes their backdrop – and a visible outline frames them, because the results inset by the line width. A plain No Fill / No Outline shape puts the results straight on your slide design, which is what the generated deck does.
3. Name the shape DirectPoll. Open the Selection Pane... – on Windows under Home → Editing → Select, on macOS under Home → Arrange, on both also under Shape Format → Arrange – double-click the shape's name, type DirectPoll, Enter. Any capitalization works; the name is what DirectPoll looks for.
4. Put the link in the shape's Alt Text. Right-click the shape → View Alt Text... (or Shape Format → Alt Text), and paste the link from Get a result link into the description box. That's it.

Repeat for each slide that should run a question or show results. Plain slides with no DirectPoll shape simply show no overlay – mix them in freely.

Then File → Save as a normal .pptx. On macOS, saving is more than housekeeping: the companion app can only read your markers from the saved file, so save after every change that affects DirectPoll.

Keeping hand control: the plain Result link

A marker whose Alt Text is the poll's plain Result link – the one from the cockpit, with no parameters appended – behaves differently from all of the above. It shows whatever the live poll is currently doing, and it lets you drive the poll by hand from the slide: move the mouse over it and the result screen's own control strip appears – pause/resume, start/next, stop – exactly as it does in a browser.

Parametrized links deliberately don't offer this. On those slides the deck is driving the poll, so every click belongs to PowerPoint and advances your show. Put a plain Result link on a slide where you want to steer the poll yourself and won't have the cockpit within reach.

Tips

• Make your first result slide &question=0&action – it stops the poll and shows the QR code. That forces a known starting state no matter what the poll was doing before you began.
• The links are "go to this state", not toggles. A slide that drives the poll to where it already is does nothing visible – that's correct. Re-walking slides just re-asserts each state.
• You don't have to touch the cockpit while presenting – the deck drives the poll. You can keep the cockpit open on another screen to watch. If you want to drive the poll by hand from within PowerPoint, put the plain Result link on a slide and steer it with the control strip on that slide (see Keeping hand control).
• Reuse the same poll across many slides – just change the &question= in each slide's Alt Text – or even mix different polls within a presentation. Just don't get lost in the possibilities.
• You can put multiple DirectPoll shapes on a single slide (up to eight). Want to keep showing the QR code while polling the first question? Put two DirectPoll shapes side by side on one slide, the QR code with &question=0 and the first question with &question=1&action appended to the Result link.

Limitations

• Only https links to directpoll.com work – any other address gets an error page instead of results (see Get a result link).
• At most eight DirectPoll shapes per slide. Beyond that the extra ones are not shown, and they are flagged while you edit so you find out then rather than mid-presentation.
• Don't put a DirectPoll shape in a group. Keep it a plain top-level shape – grouped, it is either missed entirely or placed wrongly, depending on the platform.
• The results are live, and only exist during a slideshow. They are drawn on top of your slides as you present, so they never appear in the editing view, in a printout, in a PDF or in an exported video – there, the DirectPoll shape is just the shape you drew.
• Do not read the results off Presenter View. They are drawn over the slide the audience sees. What Presenter View's own slide preview shows depends on the platform and on timing – it may show your marker as the plain rectangle you drew, or the result, or the result a moment late – so it is not the place to check. Look at the audience screen, or at the panel, which exists for exactly this reason and tells you what the current and next slides are doing.
• Nothing on the slide can sit in front of the results. They are drawn above the slideshow, so PowerPoint content overlapping the marker ends up behind them, and PowerPoint's animations and builds do not apply to them. The same goes for what PowerPoint draws while you present – a laser pointer, pen annotations, subtitles – wherever it crosses a result.
• The results don't travel with a slide transition. They disappear when the transition starts and are back once it ends – so a long transition animates your slide alone, and the results arrive with the new slide. This is deliberate: the alternative is the outgoing slide's results sitting over the animation, or sliding in from the wrong place.
• Presenting online: share the screen, not the window. In Teams, Zoom and the like, sharing the PowerPoint window can leave the results out – depending on the tool and the platform, they may be a separate window on top of it rather than part of it. Share the screen you present on and everything is there, whatever the tool. A slideshow is full-screen anyway, so this costs nothing in practice; it only bites if you habitually share a single window.

Troubleshooting

• No overlay appears. Check that the shape is named DirectPoll, that its Alt Text holds the link, and that the presenting machine can reach directpoll.com. If that all looks right, the remaining checks are platform-specific: Windows, macOS.
• A white or black box instead of see-through results. Set the poll theme to Light · clear or Dark · clear in the cockpit, or create a Custom theme with a transparent background.
• The poll doesn't move when I reach a slide. That slide's link needs &action. If the poll is already in that exact state, nothing changes (by design) – test from a different state.
• "Reveal" didn't mark answers or close voting. That question has no correct answers or hidden labels to act on, so reveal is ignored; the result still shows.
• Overlay in the wrong place or size. Move or resize the DirectPoll rectangle; the overlay follows it.
• I see the results, but my online audience doesn't. You are probably sharing the PowerPoint window. Share the screen instead – see Limitations.