Tools and Tips for Technical Presentations

We’ve all been in too many meetings and presentations with diagrams or source code that is too small to be read.  The tools and techniques I’m listing here are free.

This is a screen-grab of code that looks great, but presented through a projector your audience will be hard-pressed to read this.

ZoomIt is a screen zoom and annotation tool.  The screen will “zoom” in to the point where your mouse cursor is located just by pressing a hotkey (CTRL-1 by default).  You can also annotate by drawing on the zoomed-in area.  Here’s an example of the same code block after using ZoomIt’s default 2x setting.  While this example is showing code in Visual Studio, ZoomIt works anywhere on your screen.

Another option is built-in to Visual Studio, just hold down the CTRL key and use your mouse wheel to make the code’s font larger or smaller. This technique is useful when you want your audience to see as you type in the editor window. Here’s the same code-block using this technique:

One final Visual Studio option is available by downloading the Visual Studio Power Tools.  The power tools include an option for toggling presentation settions.  In the Quick Launch Dialog simple type PresentOn or PresentOff to adjust the fonts across Visual Studio for presentations.