Press to speak
A useful maneuver is to use your keyboard as an old-fashioned walkie-talkie. Click on the microphone icon in the lower left corner to silence (mute) the sound from your microphone. Hold down the space bar when you want to say something and release it when you’re done. The advantage of the finesse is that the people you are talking to are not disturbed by various background noises and vice versa.
Stylish for you
We can all use a little help on the trot when it comes to our sad guises. Zoom has a built-in filter that works a bit like digital TV makeup. It glosses over the worst, in other words. Go to Settings/Video and click in the button selection Touch up my appearance for some much needed virtual makeup.
Fine-fine filters
All these fun Snapchat filters can be used in Zoom as well. Download the Snapcamera program and install it. Then go to Settings/Video and select Snapcamera as the camera input.
Note! In the latest version of Mac OS X and Snapcamera, the program is not available even if you allow it to take over the camera. An update to solve the problem is currently on its way.
Virtual backgrounds
Messy at home? In Zoom, you can choose to hide everything behind you with a so-called virtual background. When you click and hold the up arrow to the right of the video camera icon at the bottom of the screen, you get a drop-down menu. Choose Choose a virtual background and you are moved to a new window where you can select an image.
Also read! Here you will find background images for the video meeting in Zoom – completely free
Want to use one own background image – which you probably want – then press the small cross on the right under the background image that appears in the middle of the window.
The procedure is the same if you want to add one video as background.
It also depends on your computer’s performance being able to handle it. Virtual background not working for you? Troubleshoot here.
Minimize Zoom
Do you want to video chat and surf in the browser at the same time? In Zoom there is a setting that reduces the video chat to a small window that is fixed in one corner. This allows you to do other things on the computer while keeping an eye on your peers.
click Meeting up in the program menu and select Enter Minimal View to reduce Zoom. In Minimal View, a small menu is available below the video window, with options that allow you to mute and unmute video and audio, as well as maximize the window and return to normal mode.
Panic commands
If for some reason you need to turn off your camera as quickly as possible (let’s say your partner enters the picture in underwear), there is a hand grip that is good to practice:
Turn off the camera: If you are running Windows, press Ctrl + Shift + V. On a Mac, run the combination Cmd, Shift + V. V, as in video, simply.
Mute the sound: If you want to silence the microphone in a pinch, replace the V with an M as in Mute.
Screen sharing: If you want to turn screen sharing off or on, replace V or M with an S as in Screensharing.
Find the right combinations
It’s a bit silly, admittedly, but often it’s the knowledge of hotkeys that separates the average user from the experts because it’s so much faster to operate a program via the keyboard instead of me using the pointing device up and down menus.
Open Settings/Shortcuts and check out the list of keyboard shortcuts. Depending on what you use Zoom for, here you can learn keyboard shortcuts for everything from taking a screenshot and recording video to jumping between different views in the program.