20 Oct Getting the best out of Zoom with tips and functions

Quick tips and utilities for enhancing your Zoom experience

Zoom is a powerful messaging and conference platform used by many, but is often underutilized because some of its functions fly under the radar. Given the importance of communication and conference calls, having every asseet available to you can make a huge difference in quality.

To help, we’ll briefly talk about some functions, tips, and tools you can take advantage of to make your next Zoom meeting a quality one.

Functions to get the most out of Zoom

The things you can do with Zoom are impressive and fit several roles.

Check Meeting Attendance

Meetings are important, and Zoom has been used for network, business, and even school communications. But did you know for said meetings you can also check attendance records? If there’s a discussion of importance, something with mandatory attendance, you can see who logged in for said meet.

Checking on this setting is simple, and accomplished by checking Reports under Zoom Account Management.

Make sure you’re the host of a meeting with attendance reports enabled before the meet, otherwise the records won’t show up.

Improve Video Quality

Clarity is everything and visual presentations add a lot to any kind of meeting. If you want to improve said clarity or how you look in a Zoom meeting, you only need to adjust a few simple settings.

The camera setting lets you select camera, adjust contrast and for low light, and add some enhancements to your appearance.

Set a Waiting Room

A small but meaningful quality of life feature in Zoom is to set up a waiting room for meeting participants. This allows enough people to gather before a conference call starts and that no one misses any important information. Before the host arrives, attendants can also talk and discuss before the it starts.

Most accounts can enable the waiting room function in their account settings, but you have more options depending on the account type, like administrator accounts.

Set Up Recurring Meets

If your organization has need for routine meetings, such as at least once a week, you have options to set them up automatically per those settings. That saves time and is simple to do.

Doing so can be accomplished by adjusting settings in your Meetings tab (Meetings Settings). As with any meeting, you can fill out all the desired details like you would as usual. However, you can check a box for recurring meetings, which allows for additional options such as when to set how often a meeting recurs, the time and date, and when the recurring meetings should stop. The feature is automatic, so it’s helpful for keeping schedules.

Create videos from calls/meetings

In the event full attendance by every invited member isn’t possible, you can also create video recordings of said web conference for later use. This is always valuable for training and courses, so of the many Zoom features, taking advantage of this one is important.

Before you do, however, make sure you set your storage settings. There’s local and cloud, the former stored on your personal HDD/SSD and cloud on Zoom. Note that cloud storage with Zoom is only for paying members. If you are a member, then you’ll need the Zoom software on your system (compatible with Linux, Mac OS, and Windows).

The record option is located under My Meetings Settings. If you can’t enable or find this option, however, it needs enabling by an administrator.

Screenshare

An invaluable tool and resource, sharing your screen aids in teaching, demonstrating, and training attendants. An even easier way to bring it up, however, is with a quick command!

CMD+Shift+S or Alt+Shift+S will start a screen share.

You can pause a screen share with Alt+T or CMD+Shift+T. Entering these again will continue the screen share.

Quick Mute

Given the amount of people that can join a single Zoom meet, you may want a fast way to mute the call. This is effective for hosts who want to quiet down any background noise so they’re the only audible speaker.

The command for this function is Alt+M or CMD+Ctrl+M.

Learn Commands

Zoom has a robust set of commands like the ones we’ve just mentioned. You don’t have to memorize them all at once, but having a few handy can greatly improve the quality (and security) of your calls. However, it’s worth noting that there are different command functions for each system and OS, so it’s not a “one size fits all.”

For convenience, you can find a list of them here from Zoom’s support page.

Conclusion

Getting the best uses of Zoom means understanding both core and advanced functions. While not typically needed, those who consistently rely on Zoom will want to take advantage of all its features, especially if they pay for the service. Hopefully our list will aid you in getting better functionality out of your software.

For more info about Zoom, IT business services, and cybersecurity, you can contact Bytagig today.