The 10 Greatest Zoom Hacks of All Time

It’s a wild new work-from-home landscape, and we keep hearing over and over that, like us, your teams are living in Zoom. From all hands meetings and business lunches to skip-level 1:1s and coffee with work friends, we’re spending 8+ hours a day in and out of different Zooms.

The upside of such intensive usage? Our learning curve has been exponential. By popular demand, we launched a Zoom integration for Donut that allows your team to start meetings right from an intro in Slack.

Once you’ve launched that meeting, what next? Here are our team’s 10 greatest Zoom hacks of all time. (If you’re not already using Donut, you can add it to Slack with one click.)

 

Try out Zoom + Donut now >>

 

1. Temporary Un-mute – Tired of hovering over the mic button just to miss the moment? Hit the spacebar and hold while you speak to temporarily un-mute yourself.

2. Silence Notifications for Screensharing – It’s everyone’s worst nightmare: a personal call or text pops up when you’re screensharing with an audience of tens (or hundreds). Turn on Do Not Disturb on Mac, or use Focus Assist in Windows to banish those embarrassing pop-ups.

3. Allow Multiple Screen-shares Simultaneously – This is it, the gold medal of Zoom screenshares: viewing two at once. Word to the wise: this works best if you have an extra monitor. Here’s how to do it.

4. Using Dual Monitors – Speaking of multiple monitors, use the dual-monitor display feature to place the video and screen-share layouts on different screens and take advantage of that extra real estate.

5. Mute All – We’ve all been in those meetings where out of 10 participants, one person’s mic is directly in the wind, another’s dog is barking in the background, and a third person is chewing extra loudly while wearing headphones. Skip the repeated pleas and mute all: hold Command+Control+M on Mac, or Alt+M on PC.

6. Quick Invite – Forget navigating 4 menus to track down a lost invite while you’re also trying to follow a live conversation. Command+I brings the invite window right up on a Mac, while Alt+I makes it easy on a PC. Want to level up even more? Under the “General” tab in settings, you can select “Automatically copy invite link once the meeting starts.” When that box is checked, the meeting link will be added to your clipboard whenever you join a meeting. 

7. Virtual Backgrounds – We’ve enjoyed seeing our coworkers’ homes, meeting their families, and catching glimpses of furry friends. But sometimes you just need to look like you’re someplace else. Upload a custom selection of virtual backgrounds so you look like you’re in the office (it’s a “wait, what??” moment every time!), at the beach, or in a scene from your favorite movie. We even made you some Donut virtual backgrounds to try, complete with a template for doing a virtual cheers, a GIF news chyron, and many sprinkles. Bonus points for coordinating background Donut selfies!

8. Display Participant Names – Whether you’re taking a lot of external calls or having Donut meetups with people you don’t already know internally, Display Names is the digital equivalent of a handy nametag.

9. Use Reactions – Like Slack reactji, it’s easy to communicate in a big meeting when someone asks “any questions?” (we give a thumbs-up), or to celebrate good news (we give a clap).

10. Use Keyboard Shortcuts, Even From Another Tab – When you find yourself deep in that Excel sheet mid-meeting and suddenly need to unmute and share some wisdom: it’s now easy to do so without having to juggle back to your Zoom screen.  When you check the “Enable Global Shortcut” box in the“Keyboard Shortcuts” tab in settings, you can use Zoom’s keyboard shortcuts even when you’re in a different app.

Did we miss any? Send us your best Zoom hacks, and we’ll keep this list updated.