Sharing Your Presentation for Participants to Join

To get your participants to start submitting responses to your slides, you need to share the presentation with them. There are two ways to do that:

1. A unique URL (AKA ‘access link’ or ‘access code’) that participants type into their phones.
2. A unique QR code that participants can scan with their phone cameras.

Below is an interactive demo, which will help you experience this function:

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Do participants need an AhaSlides account to join?

No. Participants do not need an AhaSlides account and don’t have to sign up or log in to join your presentation. They simply open the join URL or scan the QR code on their phone, enter their name if you ask for it, and they’re in. The only exception is if you’ve deliberately turned on audience verification for your presentation — for example, to restrict access to specific people. In that case, participants are asked to verify before joining. See Participant verification and Using audience authentication for how that works.

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Does the presentation time out, or do participants have to rejoin?

There is no time limit on how long an AhaSlides presentation can be joined by participants, and no idle timeout on a participant’s session. Who a participant is, and what they have already answered, is saved in their browser cache on the device they joined with — not in an AhaSlides account, since participants don’t need one. So as long as they stay in the same browser on that same device, and their browser cache is not cleared:

1. They are not asked for their details again. Their name — and their avatar, email or team, if you collect that information — is read back from the browser cache for the rest of the session, so they never have to type it in a second time.
2. A dropped connection reconnects on its own. If a phone goes to sleep, someone switches to another app, or the Wi-Fi drops for a moment, the audience page reconnects by itself as soon as they come back to it. They don’t need the access code or their name again.
3. Closing the tab isn’t fatal either. Reopening the join link brings them back as the same participant, with the same progress — for up to three days after they last took part in that presentation.

One thing does change on their screen: if you go back to a quiz slide, everyone is put back on that quiz’s lobby screen and waits for you to start the question again. That’s by design — a quiz always restarts from its lobby so everyone begins the round together. They aren’t being asked to rejoin: the lobby shows their own name. The only countdowns in AhaSlides are the per-slide answer timers you set yourself, such as Limit Time to Answer on a Poll slide or the time limit on a quiz question. Those apply to a single slide, not to the session.

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Sharing the URL/join link or access code

This URL and access code can be found on the joining instruction bar at the top of every slide in your presentation. You can view it on the slide canvas in the presentation editor, and it will also be visible during your presentation. The access code is the string after ahaslides.com/ in the URL.

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Auto-hide controls on the presenter’s screen

You can have the joining instruction bar and the presenter controls hide themselves automatically when your mouse is idle. Enable this by checking “Auto-hide controls on the presenter’s screen” in Settings > Other settings. Once enabled, the join link/instruction bar at the top and the control bar at the bottom will fade out when your mouse is inactive. Move your mouse to bring them back. Your participants can also type the join URL into their phone’s browser. Once the page has loaded on their phone, they will have joined your presentation. If the participants have the access code, they can go here to enter the code and join your presentation: audience.ahaslides.com You can also find your URL access code by clicking Share in the top-right of the editor and choosing Get audience link. You will find a link under Audience can join at. You can click the Copy button here to copy the code to your clipboard.

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Changing your URL access code

You can also customise your URL code. Simply click the code within the box to change it. A customised access code must:

• Be unique (it must not be the same as any other AhaSlides presentation’s code)
• Be under 10 characters
• Contain only letters and numbers

Once you’ve updated your code and it’s been accepted, click the ‘Save’ button.

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If your access code is already in use

An access code can be used by only one presentation at a time. If you try to save a code that another presentation is already using, AhaSlides won’t accept it and will tell you the code is already taken. That code only becomes available again when the presentation currently holding it is either:

• Deleted, or
• Changed to a different code.

Until one of those happens, no other presentation can take that code. Access codes are unique across the whole of AhaSlides, not just within your own account, so the presentation holding the code you want may belong to a different account entirely — including another account of your own. Deleting a presentation releases its access code straight away. Bear in mind that if you later restore that presentation from your trash, it comes back with a newly generated code rather than its original one.

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Your permanent access code

From Get audience link in the Share menu of the presentation editor, you can also copy your permanent access code. This long URL code will also provide your participants access to your presentation, but this link cannot be changed. No matter how many times you change your short access code, your long URL code will remain the same. To get the link, click the three-dot icon next to the Copy button, which will reveal the Copy permanent link.

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Sharing the QR code

There are two ways to share the unique QR code of your presentation with your participants.

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Presentation side column

When presenting, click anywhere in the top bar (or press ‘Q’ on your keyboard) to reveal a separate column on the left containing your QR code. This column will stay here while you present your slides (until you manually close it), allowing participants to scan the code with their phone cameras at any time during your session.

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QR code slide

You can create a slide in your presentation that reveals the QR code to your audience when you arrive at that slide. Click the add-slide icon, then select ‘QR Code’. You can drag this slide to the start or near the start of your presentation so that your participants can join it immediately.

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Have a question?

Contact our support team — if you’re logged in, use the chat bubble in the bottom-right of your dashboard; otherwise contact us here or email hi@ahaslides.com.