from PC Daily Newsletter

Windows Screen Presentation Utility

If you ever do presentations or demos or Tutorials where you are displaying your screen to others, a really useful feature is the ability to mark up or write directly on your screen to draw attention to certain areas. While a lot of commercial programs offer this functionality, a lightweight alternative which does basically the same thing is ZoomIt.

ZoomIt is a free utility which allows you to capture an image of your screen (via customizable hot-keys) and in real time, draw, type or zoom directly on the captured screen image. The really handy part is the capture process is seamless as no external program is opened. By pressing ESC you "unfreeze" the screen and all the markup disappears. This is extremely handy for doing presentations, especially if you use a tablet PC.

ZoomIt also offers a timer function where your computer can have a countdown. This would be useful if you wanted to do a presentation with interactive user exercises.

Either way, this is an extremely handy utility which doesn’t even need to be installed to run. Just double click it and go.

ZoomIt works on all versions of Windows and you can use pen input for ZoomIt drawing on tablet PCs

Using ZoomIt

The first time you run ZoomIt it presents a configuration dialog that describes ZoomIt's behavior, let's you specify alternate hotkeys for zooming and for entering drawing mode without zooming, and customize the drawing pen color and size. I use the draw-without-zoom option to annotate the screen at its native resolution, for example. ZoomIt also includes a break timer feature that remains active even when you tab away from the timer window and allows you to return to the timer window by clicking on the ZoomIt tray icon.