Take Control of Zoom

by Glenn Fleishman

Take your videoconferencing skills from zero to Zoom!

Version 1.3, updated April 6, 2021

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.

For those who host meetings or plan to, this book provides comprehensive advice and directions on planning a meeting, starting it up, and managing it, including running polls and offering breakout rooms. It also provides extensive insight into keeping meetings safe, and warning or removing problematic participants.

But what about privacy and security? You can find out how end-to-end encryption works, Zoom's implementation of it, how to enable it, and how to make sure your E2EE session remains free of snoopers.

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

279 pages, Kindle Edition

Published May 26, 2020

About the author

I started writing as a child and never stopped. I’ve always been interested in what makes things tick and how to explain that. That led to a career as a technology journalist and how-to article and book author. I’ve written dozens of books over my career in some combination of the two.

In the 2010s, I started publish a series of book that combined printing and type history and technology in a variety of ways. These titles include Not To Put Too Fine a Point on It, a collection of essays and reporting; London Kerning, a look at two magnificent London printing collections and the city’s typographical history; Six Centuries of Type & Printing; and How Comics Were Made, a heavily visual history of the production and reproduction of newspaper comics from the 1890s to the present.

I live in Seattle, Washington, with my family, and drink very little coffee.

Reviews

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

I thought I knew everything about Zoom before I read the book, not even close. It was a good read for me since I support our Zoom environment and everyone looks up to me to make it work.