Your Screen Share Might Look Unprofessional to a Laptop User
Anybody can share a screen, zoom makes that easy. Right?
But … it takes a little bit more skill to make it easy for the laptop on the receiving end, to read your screen.
How to Make Your Screen Readable on Their Laptop?
TL;DR: The 3 minute demo might be the easy way.
The Mathematical Explanation
Here is what really happens, if we look at this as professionals.
One professional might be on a laptop with screen resolution as low as 1920 x 1080
Another professional might be sharing from a desktop screen with resolution as high as 3840 x 2160
If the guy with 3840 wide screen
has good eyes
and thus 10pt text
and shares
and the guy who has bad eyes
and a 1920 wide screen
and then zoom eats some portion of the screen anyway
then the guy with bad eyes viewing on the laptop is essentially reading 3 point text with bad eyes.
Yeah, that doesn’t work.
And the guy who is sharing jokes “heh, looks great on my screen.”
What is the remedy?
There are many remedies, but two groups of remedies stand out.
But first, it really is up to others to speak up. If someone is being a knucklehead narcissist and sharing a huge screen, they should at least be informed of what they are doing to others, even if unintentionally.
Increase Type Size
This is a simple command in IntelliJ, for example. But it still isn’t my favorite approach. Does work, though.
What i do is Always share a very small part of one screen, never a whole screen
This has the advantage of working for every app, not just your coding app. Fit each app into the appropriately sized zoom window, and come across as courteous to every viewer.
No fuss, no muss, no bother.
How to do this, professionally
Start your own zoom session with yourself
Practice different ways of sharing your screen for 5-10 minutes
You are now better prepared to share your screen with skill and courtesy