Take Control of Zoom

Take your videoconferencing skills from zero to Zoom!
Version 1.1, updated 8/27/2020

Many of us rarely touched a video chat or videoconferencing tool until the pandemic hit. Now, we videoconference daily (or more often) for work meetings, to talk to clients, to stay in touch with friends and family, and for school—we’ve gone from zero to Zoom!

Despite Zoom's broad adoption and frequent usage over several months, users sometimes struggle to keep up with the service's features and interface. Zoom changes constantly, and often spreads useful or important features across two or three different places. Take Control of Zoom helps demystify powerful features in the Zoom apps, while also making sure you can customize and control the software to meet your needs, whether as a participant trying to see and hear everyone in a meeting or a host making a presentation.

The book covers a broad range of topics, from which Zoom app to use and how to configure your account and app even before your first meeting, to how to work among Zoom views and chat in a meeting, to creating and managing your own meetings.

It also dives extensively into sharing your screen and making presentations. The book offers step-by-step instructions on working with macOS and Windows full-screen modes, and using PowerPoint and Keynote for static or interactive presentations that are fed through Zoom, how to manage on a single- or dual-monitor computer, using multiple computers and devices at once, and integrating multiple video sources for real-world demonstrations or sharing hard-copy documents.

You also learn about virtual cameras, software that can take one or more media sources—still images, video, animation, app windows, and sometimes more—and mix into a camera feed you can simply select and broadcast as a host or participant in Zoom. That category includes Camo, mmHmm, OBS, and Zoom's new built-in Slides as Virtual Background feature.

But what about privacy and security? Zoom’s skyrocketing use revealed how insecure some of its software design choices were and how sloppy the company had been as it added options. Since March 2020, Zoom has rolled out hundreds of fixes and dozens of changes, all well documented in the book. Take Control of Zoom doesn’t shirk discussing past flaws and Zoom’s ongoing plans, and offers insight into which purposes you can safely use the system for and how to re-establish trust in what they offer.

Here’s what you will find in Take Control of Zoom:

• Learn how to install and configure Zoom.
• Decide if a web app meets your needs or it’s something to recommend to other meeting participants.
• Configure your physical setup and your hardware for best results on video.
• Upgrade your audio for better comfort and quality.
• Understand Zoom’s past missteps with security and what it promises now.
• Master participating in a meeting, including the various methods of “speaking up.”
• Get to know Zoom’s many mobile and desktop views for seeing other people and shared screens.
• Discover the best ways to present in PowerPoint and Keynote.
• Learn important workarounds for Keynote that give you full control and flexibility.
• Figure out the best combination of screens and devices for manage each of your presentations.
• Become a host and start meetings with one other person or 1,000.
• Dig into Zoom’s meeting controls to create safe meetings and manage public ones, keeping participants safe and blocking or removing problematic members.
• Find out how to preserve your privacy when sharing apps, presentations, or other parts of your screen.
• Record a meeting for later playback, presentation, or a podcast.
• Decide whether upgrading to a paid Zoom tier offers enough improvement and features for meetings you host.