Windows Developer Power Tools

23.2 Spotlighting Content in Your Presentations with ZoomIt

If you do any public speaking or demonstrations of software or source code, you really need some form of zoom tool. Zoom tools are critical to help you get your points across, regardless of whether you’re making a presentation to a large audience or doing a code review for a few colleagues.

ZoomIt from Sysinternals is a very lightweight zoom tool with several terrific features. It lets you pan and zoom on the entire screen, offers a markup/annotation feature, and lets you display a break timer to remind your audience that they’re supposed to return in 10 minutes, not 45.

ZoomIt at a Glance
Tool	ZoomIt
Version covered	1.0
Home page	http://www.sysinternals.com/Utilities/ZoomIt.html
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/164
Summary	Simple zoom tool with a drawing feature for marking up portions of your screen during presentations
License type	Custom, see http://www.sysinternals.com/Licensing.html
Online resources	Forum
Related tools in this book	Magnifixer

Getting Started

ZoomIt, like most tools from Sysinternals, is a simple standalone executable. Unpack it from the .zip distribution and drop it in a useful folder (perhaps one in your PATH variable).

Tip

Define a MagicWord in SlickRun (discussed in the previous article) so you can quickly launch ZoomIt with a minimum of hassle.

Using ZoomIt

The first time you launch ZoomIt, you’ll ...