I am often asked about the tools I use when presenting remotely. Truth is, I use a variety of tools to cover various use cases. The main program I use is called Zoomit and I use it in conjunction with Power toys, Visio, Diagrams.net, MS Whiteboard and even PowerPoint to maxmise the usefulness.
I started my remote working journey back in 2017 so have had some time to try a few things, refine my approach and remember a bunch of shortcut keys!
Sysinternals Zoomit
A powerful library of tools for Windows PCs is the Sysinternals. I use the ZoomIt Utility from Sysinternals for
- zooming into an area of a webpage or presentation
- quickly highlighting or marking up a part of a presentation
- quickly drawing some shapes and lines to demonstrate some logic
- draw arrows or shapes to draw attention to a part of a webpage or presentation
Download Zoomit from this page
Once downloaded I set the ZoomIt utility as a start-up program by placing a shortcut to the executable in the start up folder (win+r, then shell:startup). That way, it is always ready to go when I need to jump in and use it.
There are 2 main modes that I regularly use. Zoom mode and drawing mode.
Once enabled you can draw with your mouse or other pointing device (although I’ve found it doesn’t work well with graphics tablets and pens as you can’t see the pointer before you start drawing).
You can change the colour easily with short cut keys. If you are in drawing mode, you just need to press the first letter of the colour you wish to use to switch to that colour.
- Red
- Blue
- Green
- Pink
- Orange
- Yellow
In Draw mode my favourite shortcuts are
- Hold Ctrl – to draw a rectangle
- Hold Tab – to draw an ellipse
- Hold Ctrl and Shift – to draw an arrow
- Hold Shift – to draw line
Many standard shortcuts can also be applied, like Ctrl-z and Ctrl-s. A full list of shortcuts can be found here
Power Toys
I’ve mentioned Power Toys before in this post to help control Teams with a footswitch.
Power toys is a great project for adding some additional functionality to Windows PCs. Some functions I use a lot are
- fancy zones – map windows quickly to a preferred layout
- paste as plain text
- always on top
There are many utilities and I’d advise installing and spending some time looking into the possibilities it could add to your workflow.
For presenting I use the find my mouse shortcut in the mouse utilities. Turning this on allows you to draw attention to your mouse pointer by quickly double tapping your left control key. The screen dims slightly, and a circle appears around your pointer. I often find it useful to check that all meeting participants are looking at the same part of the screen at times, and this is a simple way to do that.
Wrapping up
I often use the Zoomit tool when presenting remotely to mark up a webpage to help ensure alignment on something visual. I have also found preparing a diagram and using the tool to annotate the diagram as I describe the flow or steps can help engagement and clarity. You can then save the marked-up image for reference later. It’s a fun and useful tool and it can become very effective with just a few shortcuts to memorise.
There are also a few other features I’ve not mentioned that you might find useful in your workflow.