Tag: video conferencing

Zoom Tip: how to hide those pesky grey boxes during screen sharing.

Have you ever been in a Zoom meeting while someone is sharing their screen and grey boxes began showing up at random, covering parts of what’s being shared?

I have. And it’s annoying. I actually see it from both sides when I share my screen because I often run multiple computers during Zoom meetings: I run the meeting on my two monitor desktop, I share PowerPoint slideshows from my laptop and I sometimes join on my tablet as well, so I see the grey boxes on my desktop and tablet AND I see the actual messages behind the boxes on my laptop.

I haven’t wanted to derail an entire session and make people wait while I searched for the setting, and truth be told, I use GoToMeeting more often, so I kept forgetting about Zoom’s grey box problem after the sessions were over. Today, I finally took the time to troubleshoot. I had to try a number of search strings before I finally tracked down the issue because I didn’t know exactly what setting I was looking for. Search strings referencing “Zoom notifications” didn’t lead me to the answer. These messages weren’t really notifications. Of the multiple messages I kept seeing on my laptop, the one I saw the most actually read:

“You are sharing your screen.”

Thank you Zoom, for letting me know that. 🙄

I’ll cut to the chase. The messages are “meeting controls” and here’s how to turn them OFF during your Zoom sessions and make the grey boxes stop Zoom bombing your meetings:
(click to zoom in…no pun intended)

How to Change the Default Time Zone in GoToMeeting

If you have a subscription to GoToMeeting, you already know you can change the timezone for an individual meeting, but if you’re like me, you’d rather change the time zone for EVERY meeting automatically.

After digging through all the options under Settings, I came up empty and searched the net, but only found instructions to change the zone for individual meetings. The main support page also stated: “…please note that the meeting invitation text will display the date/time in your computer’s timezone, not the one selected in the Schedule window.”

Not true for me. When I copy/pasted the invite into an email, the time zone was PDT and my computer knows I live in EDT.

I knew there had to be a default setting somewhere. Found it in an unexpected place – under my “LogMeIn” personal information. Below are screen shots and instructions to change YOUR GoToMeeting default time zone in three easy steps:

Step 1: Click the drop-down arrow next to your profile photo, then select “My profile.”

Step 2: On the “Personal Info” tab, click the drop-down arrow under “Time zone” and scroll to your zone to select it.

Step 3: Click “SAVE”

All future meetings will be automatically set to your new default time zone.

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