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Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Using My Mouse to Magnify During Presentations

When I'm doing a presentation, especially one that involves demonstrations of software, I often use Magnify to zoom in on a portion of the screen. I often get asked after the presentation how I do it and I just got asked via email the same question. The honest answer is that I stumbled into my solution having bought a Microsoft Mouse that included the Magnifier feature. This allowed me to assign a mouse button (even without the special button such as the zoom wheel click) to be the magnify option. This is extremely handy.

A slightly less handy option is the built in Windows Accessibility tool Magnifier. You can find it by going to Start >> Programs >> Accessories >> Accessibility >> Magnifier. It's pretty easy from there. The only problem I have with it is that I have to fiddle with it too much during the presentation. Clicking the button is much faster.

If you don't want to buy a Microsoft Mouse with the Magnify feature, then I'd suggest you take a look into one of these inexpensive applications that claim to do the same thing. I've not used these - so if you have, please let me know what you find out.

http://www.dirfile.com/freeware/mouse-magnifier.htm
http://www.freedownloadmanager.org/downloads/mouse_magnifier_software/

3 comments:

Tracy Parish said...

Thanks for responding to my email through your blog. Great idea. Great tips.

Rachel Boyd said...

Yes, having some sort of magnifying is a great tool for presentations etc. I use the zoom function in the universal access preference of my mac. People always ask me how I do it! Great to know you can also do similar on the pc!

Cheers, Rachel, NZ

Anonymous said...

Thanks for the reminder! I was one of the folks who approached you about this after your eLearning Guild presentation. I just need to figure out how to do this on my wireless Logitech mouse... Since my SMEs insist on filling their PowerPoint slides with complete sentences and minute details, we need a way to magnify them!