Zoom, the popular video meeting app that shot to popularity over the course of the pandemic has become a day-to-day asset for many people working from home and remotely over the course of the past year. Zoom has become a hub for online meetings for businesses both large and small, universities for studying, and even families for saying hello after long times apart. The security issues that occurred early in its operative years have now been resolved with end-to-end encryption, resolving any previous concerns. This has allowed the business to grow and thrive over the last two years and become one of the biggest booming businesses internationally. Here are a couple of my favorite zoom hacks that will help you become a master of the art of Zoom.
1. How to Set up a Waiting Room
Setting up a waiting room for added privacy is a great way to avoid unwanted guests in Zoom meetings and build an air of privacy online. Having unwanted people in your Zoom meeting is like having a board room with no door on it. There is no way to control who pops in and out of meetings and it can end up becoming quite hard to control. To put the waiting room, feature on, simply go to account management and account settings. Click on the tab for meeting and click enable waiting room to turn it on. You will thank me for this one, trust me!
2. Enable Zoom Breakout Rooms to Allow Smaller, Personal Discussions.
One of the hardest things to enable in a Zoom business meeting is the ability for all people to be able to contribute and speak. Getting everyone’s individual opinions and thoughts on a matter will not be possible if there are always 40 people in a room. Lillian Rose, a tech writer at Boomessays, commented, “Inevitably, the loudest and biggest personalities in the meeting will take over if groups are not split up to get more input personally. You can split a meeting into up to 50 smaller rooms to avoid this.” To start a breakout room, simply go to account management and account settings. Then click the meeting tab, click breakout room, and toggle it on.
3. Share your Screen with the Group
This is an important one! When you are showing a board room or group meeting something, it is better to share your screen rather than try to present it on your normal camera. In order to do this, simply press the option to share your entire whole desktop screen. You just need to then pick what you want to share and simply press the red ‘stop share’ button to cease.
4. Turn on the “Gallery View”
This is a good idea if there are multiple people speaking at once or you need to see more than one person’s screen at any one time. A gallery view will show all screens available to view up to 49 screens at once. To turn this on, simply press the tab that says “Gallery View” in the righthand top corner.
5. Save A Meeting to Your Computer
This feature is incredibly important if you need to repost or send around a copy of the meeting to people who were not able to make it, or people that need to review the content available at the meeting. The great thing about this is that both free and paid Zoom users can use this option, which makes this accessible to all users. To do this, you need to record the meeting to whatever device you are using to host the meeting, and then upload the file to a storage drive. You need to press settings, and then recording to go ahead and press the toggle to ‘on’. Make sure you press ‘record’ first.
6. Extend a Group Meeting to Host for Longer than 40 minutes.
Zoom’s basic tier only allows for a 40-minute-long meeting, and this is impossible to get around without re-starting meetings every time the meeting comes to a close. The only way to get past this barrier is to upgrade to a premium Zoom paid account.
written by: Elizabeth Hines, an online learning and digital marketing executive and content writer at OX Essays review writing service.