ZoomIt Damn It!

ZoomIt is a fantastic little zoom tool from Windows Sysinternals that I regularly use to ensure my audience can clearly see the areas of my demo screens that I’m discussing.  When adeptly used, ZoomIt can add a lot of professional polish to your software demos and help retain your audience’s attention.  I’m constantly amazed at how many people do not use such a tool to present their demos and lose their audience’s focus by presenting busy, hard to see, screens.  Smart people, good presenters, good material, lots of effort put into building the demo, then they apologize for the screen being hard to see.  Come on!  Zoom tools have been around for a while and yet I rarely see them used; I would say less than 10% of the many software demo presentations I’ve attended.

If you present software demos, use ZoomIt or risk having your audience fall asleep, leave, talk, do email, play with their iPhone which they’ll be doing regardless … anything except try to read your demo screen.  It’s easy to become adept at using ZoomIt and it will add professional polish to your demos.