Computer presentations have evolved into the core foundation of many meetings. GotoMeeting and WebEx make it very easy to share your desktop to make presentations. The core tools built into either product work great with PowerPoint-type presentations.
However, both also break down when you’re trying to present technical content. In that context, you need to be able to quickly and easily zoom and annotate the screen. For that purpose, every presenter’s PC should have ZoomIt installed. ZoomIt is free and works great with GotoMeeting and I assume it would work fine with WebEx as well.
With Zoomit installed, you can quickly zoom the screen and annotate it with text, lines, and shapes. You can also annotate a non-zoomed screen as well. With either of these modes, the screen is static and you’ll need to press Escape to return to the underlying app. There is a mode called LiveZoom that is supposed to allow input while the screen is zoomed, but I’ve experienced quirky results with that mode. I stick to the regular zoom mode.
When installed, ZoomIt sits in your Windows notification and a right mouse click brings up its options panel, shown below.
Using this panel you can customize Zoomit’s hot keys and set program defaults.
If you ever need to share your PC screen for a technical presentation, you absolutely need ZoomIt. It’s free and it works. What more could you want!
A bonus presentation tip
I’ve sat through an excruciating number of online presentations where the presenter was using Visual Studio to show code and didn’t know how to quickly make the font larger. With today’s high-resolution monitors, you can’t expect attendees to see your tiny fonts during your presentation. In Visual Studio, press the Control key down and scroll the mouse wheel back and forth to increase and decrease Visual Studio’s code editor font. Please learn to do this! Your attendees will greatly appreciate it.
Alas, it’s no longer possible to change the font used to display various windows in Visual Studio (the Solutions Explorer or the Property window for example). But hey, that’s why you’re using ZoomIt!
