I regularly have to run powerpoint presentations through web meetings. And we all know the joy that brings. Steve pointed me to zoom-it many months ago. Today though I want to share how I use it with my lenovo tablet. Prior to the conference I run zoom-it and set the options to run annotation using the left arrow:
Note: when you stop presenting you may want to change this back or close zoom-it otherwise everytime you left arrow you realise that annotation has started and you didn’t move left a cell in excel 🙂
So now in presentation mode in the web meeting with tablet in tablet mode I can use the buttons available to me on my mouse to control slide flow, the left button on the tablet to trigger the annotation and the escape key to remove annotation before moving to the next slide.
Why the left arrow? simple, there are very few buttons available when in tablet mode, the X60 has enter, the arrow keys and escape. You may want enter to advance slides, escape you’ll need to cancel the zoom-it pen function, and there are no other keys available. You can see a sample of the kind of annotation here.
Its a really simple yet powerful adjunct to running the slide show in the web meeting.
Even if I’m presenting in normal PC mode using presenter view I’ll use zoom-it over the in-built powerpoint pen as I find it just doesn’t work well when working in presentation mode.
Stu Downes 
Pleased you like it Stu. Worth pointing out that it works just fine on a laptop/desktop just using the mouse, no need for a Tablet and that I use F10 to activate ZoomIT. I find that using F10 I can leave it active all the time and so I never have to think – is it running – I also like to use it to scribble on the screen when i’m doing 1 to 1 demonstrations or discussions, but it works great in web conferences too
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Hi Stuart, it works really well, am I missing a trick or do your annotations get lost as soon as you press escape / return to the active application
Thanks, Sean
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Hi Stuart,
it looks really powerful but I cant see a way to save your annotations – am I missing a trick ?
Thanks, Sean
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Hi Sean, no you aren’t missing a trick, it isn’t a tool for inking on the slides simply an overlay tool to aid presentation. The review tools in powerpoint 2007 allow inking.
Stu
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Sorry about the double comments ! I thought I had posted and then I couldn’t find my comments earlier today. Though it was early onset senility for a while.
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@5 Sean, no worries, looks like wordpress got in the way because it didn’t recognise your IP and flagged it for moderation 🙂
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Do you know of any way to actually type on the slides while presenting in say GoToWebinar?
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i’d recommend just screen sharing and using the slides in development mode (maximised view) rather than presentation mode and then type onto the slides
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