Best Practices When Sharing a Screen

In this article, we will give you some tips and best practices on how to maximize your screen sharing presentation. This will help your attendees read what is happening on your screen. On Livestorm your live screen sharing can go up to 1080p depending on your environment (connection, bandwidth, etc.).

Maximize Screen Resolution#

While sharing your screen, make sure to always share the proper resolution, if you are sharing a screen within a big monitor that screen will appear very distant for certain attendees:

In this screenshot, you can see that the browser window I'm sharing appears very small. This is because the screen resolution is too high. To solve this problem, I just resize the window I'm sharing by grabbing one corner:

There you go. My screen is much more legible than before. So when you are hosting demo/training webinar always make sure that your attendees will have a legible screen.

You can even zoom in your window:

Enlarge the cursor pointer#

This is linked to the previous issue. It's nice to have a legible screen but it is even nicer if people know where you click when you present your screen.

On Mac OS

You can follow  this tutorial that will guide you through the system preferences on Mac. To paraphrase the article, you need to:

• Launch System Preferences.

• Click either Universal Access preference (OS X Lion and earlier) or Accessibility preference (OS X Mountain Lion and later).

• Click the Mouse tab (OS X Lion and earlier) or click the Display item in the sidebar (OS X Mountain Lion and later).

• Find a horizontal slider called Cursor Size. Grab the slider and drag it to adjust the mouse pointer's size. You can dynamically see the mouse pointer resize as you drag the slider.

• Bonus: You can also use a dedicated software like Mouseposé that puts a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer. 

On Windows 10

• Open PC settings.

• Choose Ease of Access to enter its settings.

• Click Mouse, and choose new pointer size and color in the options.

Unclutter your screen#

There's nothing worse than a screen with too much going on. If you're like me you probably have a desktop filled with documents and screenshots, folders etc. And if you're on a Mac, you probably have a dozen of apps running on your Mac menu bar. All of those things put together will distract your attendees from actually paying attention.

Hopefully, there are a few things you can to unclutter your workspace — Plus, you will feel much lighter after removing the noise:

Hide the documents on your desktop#

On Mac, it requires to open up the terminal to hide them but it's very straightforward and will only take a few minutes, all you need is to follow this  very detailed tutorial. Or you can download an app that will do it for you.

On Windows 10, it's even simpler: right-click on an empty area of your desktop, select the View menu and then uncheck Show desktop icons: 

Turn off notifications#

This is a classic: getting email or chat notification during a presentation. Not only it can be awkward getting a private email from your colleague in front of everyone, it is also very disturbing for you and your audience.

On Mac OS

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Notifications. Or even simpler: hold down the Option key while you click the Notification Center icon in the menu bar. When "Do Not Disturb" is on, the Notification Center icon in the menu bar is dimmed.

On Windows 10

Go to All Settings and click on System and go to the Notifications & Actions option on the right. You then have a lot of options to really customize your experience. You also have an option Hide notifications while presenting that you can turn on.