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/

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