(electronic chiming) - It doesn't matter if you work remotely, if you work from home, or
if you work from an office, chances are you are
using video conferencing more and more often. So in today's video,
I wanna share with you seven of my favorite tips for getting the most out of Zoom meetings. Hello everyone, Scott
Friesen here at Simpletivity, helping you to get more
done, and enjoy less stress. And let's dive right in. Here I am within my Zoom meeting. And I'm sharing the
screen here at the moment. But my very first tip for you has to do with one of my
favorite shortcut keys. So let me actually stop
sharing for just a moment here. And I'm gonna open up my
participants window here. So often, I'm on a call with five, seven, 10, 20 or more people, and suddenly there's some background noise and it's interrupting
either my presentation or something that I'm
saying at the moment. So one of my favorite shortcut keys is the ability to mute
everyone, instantaneously. Now yes, here, I can select
that Mute All option, but I don't always have this window open, I may be in the middle of
showing or doing something else. So all I need to do is
select Alt+M on my keyboard, that's Alt+M, and that will
immediately mute everyone else. Alt+M, of course, for PC,
it is command control M, if you happen to be a Mac user. And if you just hit it again, of course, you're going to unmute everyone as well. Now this can be really helpful, especially if someone
else is working remotely, and you hear a dog barking or
some other background noise on someone else's line. You'll notice here in the
manage participants area that that microphone is
moving when I'm talking. But it stops when I'm not talking. So this can be a clue for you
to help find that individual if you just wanna mute that one person. But if you need to, or if
you don't need the time, don't have the time to
identify that individual, you can use Alt+M to mute everyone else. So let's go into sharing my screen. I'm gonna share my entire
desktop at the moment here. And one of my pet peeves
for the longest time with using Zoom, when
I'm sharing my screen, is that this little floating menu here, which is very helpful as I
make different options here, it sort of hides many of my tabs. And you can see, I've got
a tab open right here. You don't know how many times I've accidentally stopped sharing because I actually wanted
to select this browser tab, but I hit Stop Sharing instead. Well, there is a way that we
can minimize this all together. And what you need to do
is come over here to more, and come all the way down to
Hide Floating Meeting Controls. Now yes, there is a shortcut
key Ctrl+Alt+Shift+H, I don't know how much
of a shortcut that is, if you need four keys to do so. So I usually just select this manually. But if I select this, you can see that that floating Zoom menu is gone. So now I can go here, I can click through
all these tabs at ease. Nothing is in my way. And if I need to get back to that menu, all I need to do is select
escape on my keyboard. Very quickly, one more time
hide floating meeting controls, it's telling me right here, press escape. If I need to show it again, I
can go about my presentation, I can use my computer the way I want. And then I can hit escape
to get that menu back and visible to me. All right, let's go back
at this time around, I'm gonna stop sharing, and I'm actually gonna
go into my settings here, my Zoom meeting settings, let's go back, here we
are into the desktop app. Let me just move my, let me just move my
picture here for a second. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna hit this little gear icon, which is called Settings. Now there's an awful lot of settings that you can tweak and
adjust here within Zoom, but I wanna focus on two important ones, or at least they're very important to me. The first one is under Video and yes, you can preview your video, you can choose a different camera if you need to here as well. But the one that I always
turn on is this one, turn off my video when joining a meeting. By default, whether I'm the host or whether I'm joining
someone else's Zoom meeting, I want my video to be turned off. Now the reasoning for this,
is that I wanna make sure that I initiate that video. I don't wanna click a link on something and then forget that,
"Oh, yeah, that's right, "I'm on video and, and what's
behind me or what's going on, "do I have my mic set up?" All of this type of thing. So by default, I wanna
have my video turned off when I either host or join
any type of Zoom meeting, and then I can initiate it, right? I can initiate it with a single click. The other tip that I
wanna share with you here within settings, has to do with video, but it has to do with something that's called Virtual Background. And this is something that Zoom
has had for a little while, but maybe you've never experimented with virtual background before. So here you can see I've got
nothing here in the background. You can just see the
background of my office here. But what zoom allows you to
do, is to upload other images that you would like to
add as your background, and you don't need a green screen. You can see I don't have a
green screen behind me here, I can just select one of these images, and put them as my background. Now I'm showing you some
of the default images here. I also wanted to show you
can upload actual images, you can have a an image, a
video background, if you want. Here are the Northern Lights, here's the tropical
seaside if you want to. But the one that I
choose to use most often, this is one that I created. It's very, very simple,
it's it's mostly black, it's mostly dark, but it also
has my logo in the corner. So the reason why I use
this virtual background more and more often, is number
one, I don't have to care about what's going on in the background. I may be at a busy cafe, I may be working from my
kitchen island at home, and I don't have to worry
that there's a fridge and a dirty stove behind me, 'cause I've got my virtual
background working here. The other nice benefit that I like here, is that I can actually add some branding. So here you can see, I've got
my logo in the top corner. You can have your full
name, you can have an icon, whatever you would like to add to it. You can add your own
colors if you want to. So it adds a little bit
of branding to it as well. And the next one on our
list I wanna show you is actually something that
I use every single day. In fact, this is probably the
most used feature that I use when it comes to Zoom. And it has to do with
scheduling your meetings. So I'm gonna jump into Google Calendar, and I'm gonna open up
this little fake meeting that I set up here, and I'm
gonna go into the edit mode. Whether you use Microsoft Outlook or whether you use Google Calendar, I implore you to download and
use the add ons or extensions for your calendar. So in this case, I have
the Google Calendar, the Google Chrome extension installed. You can see up here I've
got that little icon, this allows me to schedule
a meeting, if I want to, or I can start a meeting immediately. It even gives me conveniently the option to start with video off,
or start with video on. But the other bonus, as you can see here, as I'm creating this meeting
within Google calendars, I have an additional button,
called Make it a Zoom Meeting. So as I'm adding the title, and my guests, and maybe a few other details,
with just a single click, I can say make it a zoom meeting. And here I've got that meeting link here, under the location area. And if I scroll down to the description, it's got all this other great information, which my guests are going to
need, whether it's the link, I mean, they can click
this link right away, but depending on where they are, they can use the one tap mobile option. If they need to dial in by a phone, if they can't connect by
audio, by their computer, they can choose one of these
dial-in numbers as well, all in a single click. And then when I come back in here, when it's time for this meeting, all I have to do is select
Join the Zoom Meeting. I don't have to click somewhere else, I don't have to go to the Zoom interface, I can just say Join the Zoom Meeting, and it's gonna launch it
for me, and dive right in. So whether you're an Outlook
user, or a Google user, please, please download the extension so that you can get even
more out of this tool. Now the other thing that I wanna show you, and we'll just stick on this
dummy meeting invite here, is a couple of settings here, a couple of options, I should
say, with this floating menu. And the two in particular are
New Share and Pause Share. So at the moment, I'm
sharing my screen right now, pretty common, pretty
standard here within Zoom. But a lot of people are not familiar with what these actually mean, or how they should be using them. So in this case, if I
wanna move from this, showing you my browser here, and I wanna go to say a Word document, all I need to do is select New Share, and now I can go and
find that other document or that other place, that
I would like to share. So let's say it is a Word document, so I'm gonna click on this Word document. Remember, no one in my
meeting is seeing this window. I'm seeing this because I'm the organizer and I'm wanting to share
something at the moment. As soon as I click on
this, this Word document and select Share, I'm instantly
taken to that Word document, and so is everyone else that
is viewing this screen share. So they don't see any
of that me selecting it, they don't see me looking for a folder, nothing along those likes. And if I wanna go back up
here, and I say New Share, and I wanna go back to the web, I can select it and say Share, I'm instantaneously brought back here. So you can remove all sort of that clunky feeling of
minimizing, maximizing, finding the thing that
you wanna share next, make it a really smooth transition for those people who are
on the meeting with you. The other one is Pause Share. Now this can be used very similarly, if I want to say, you know, just pause, and here you can see your
screen sharing is paused, and then I could go
and find that document. But the other great thing I
find about the pause function is that, let's say I'm
giving a presentation, I want to review some notes, or I want to go look something else up, but I don't want everyone else to know that I'm looking that up or
I'm finding this special number or whatever the case may be, I can hit pause and they
can remain on this screen, it's as if nothing else has happened. I can go back and find some information, go reference a file, that type of thing. And then when I'm ready, I
can just say Resume Share, and here I am back on this screen. I can hit pause, and I could
go somewhere else as well if I want to, but take a look at both New Share and Pause
Share to make your presentations and make your screen sharing
just a little more polished. And then the last thing,
the final tip today that I wanna share with you
has to do with annotations. Something that I think it's overlooked. Here it is, it's the very
last option before More, and yet it's so valuable. If you click Annotate, there's
a variety of different ways that you can highlight
things on your screen. A few of my favorites,
one would be Spotlight. Here, it adds a little red spotlight, so if people have trouble
following your cursor, you wanna make sure people know exactly what you're talking about, they can follow you along with
this little red spotlight. There's also this little arrow,
it's like an arrow stamp. So if I want people to
look at this Guests field, I can click over here, or I
can highlight and then click. Do you see this little white
arrow, no one is seeing this, no one on my meeting is
actually seeing this. It's not until I click on it, it's gonna put this little
stamp here with my name, so they know that I'm the
one who placed it there. Because remember, you
can allow other people to annotate as well. And if you want to undo or redo, you can always click these
buttons here as well, or hit clear to clear
all of your drawings. You can draw, you can add
text, you can add other stamps. This arrow is a little bit different. This allows you to keep permanent arrows. So instead of one at a time, I can go down a variety of fields here. And again, I can hit
undo if I wanna go back, or just clear all my drawing. So Annotate can be a
really helpful one as well. So I'd love to hear from you next. Which of these seven
tips were your favorite? And did I miss anything? Is there a special Zoom meeting
tip that you love to use? Make sure you share that with us, and with the rest of the
Simpletivity community down below. Thanks so much for watching, and remember, being productive does
not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple!
