Can I suggest a different approach? It doesn’t answer your original question, but might offer some compromise thoughts?
Perhaps your desire for a clean look at the front of your church overrides even the guest’s desire to need their laptop in front of them?
Can you mitigate the need for them to have their laptop with them at all? Can you ask some “friendly guests”
Why do you need your laptop in front of you? . Perhaps it’s a bad experience in the past with controlling the presentation? Then buy some top-notch presentation remotes (
D’san Perfect Cue /
Interspace MicroCue) to give them confidence. Perhaps they want to see what slide they’re on? Give them a repeater screen at the back of the hall, or behind some flowers on the floor. Or give them a tablet/iPad on the lectern and
send them their signal back rather than them sending it to you — that direction is more of a reliable path (screen share for example). Perhaps they want to see their slide notes? Offer to print them off... (not a tech solution at all but perhaps wins over ‘cables on the floor’?) Some laptops that support multiple external displays could have slides on one external screen and presenter notes on another screen — share that screen to a tablet, and give them that.
Again, sorry this doesn’t answer your question directly, but I guess I was interested to see if there was a different approach.