What is Zoom ?

Zoom has become one of the best video conferencing apps in 2020.

Due to the COVID-19 global pandemic, many organizations were forced to shut down their places of business and transition their employees to remote work.

So they needed an effective, affordable and readily available video conferencing app to enable them effectively communicate and collaborate with their team members.

This business need suddenly pushed Zoom into the lime light and soon it became the number one trending video conferencing app in the world.

But what is Zoom ?

Zoom is a software as a service app (SaaS) that allows you to virtually communicate with people.

It has numerous functionalities that make it so robust and some of them are :

  1. Private meetings : Zoom allows you to have virtual private meetings with your friends, family and colleagues. With text, calls and video functionalities, you can choose the right communication tool for you.

2. Group meetings: Zoom also has group meeting functionalities which allows you to communicate with a large number of people at the same time. These group meetings can be scheduled and links would be sent out to the participants.

It also allows you to chose text, call and video options while having the meetings and you can create smaller group meetings within that larger group meeting called breakout rooms.

But is Zoom free ?

Zoom has both free and paid subscription options.

The free options has some limitations though, it only allows you to call for up to 40 minutes at a time and some functionalities such as recording have been disabled.

The paid subscription options has different levels based on the subscribers needs and has many more functionalities such as unlimited calling time, the recording functionality and the ability to add hundreds of invitees to the same meeting.

What are some of Zoom keyboard shortcuts ?

There is noting more annoying than trying to unmute a meeting to respond to a question and then the microphone icon isn’t working.

So here are a few Zoom meetings keyboards shortcuts to help you out in a pinch.

Alt + A or Command(⌘)+Shift+A: Mute or unmute audio.
Alt+M or Command(⌘)+Control+M: Mute or unmute audio for everyone except the meeting’s host.
Alt+S or Command(⌘)+Control+S: Start sharing your screen.
Alt+R or Command(⌘)+Shift+R: Start or stop local recording of the meeting.
Alt+C or Command(⌘)+Shift+C: Start or stop cloud recording of the meeting.
Alt+P or Command(⌘)+Shift+P: Pause or resume recording of the meeting.
Alt+F1 or Command(⌘)+Shift+W: Switch to active speaker view in video meeting.