When you’re in the middle of a Zoom video meeting at home and your cat starts bawling for its dinner, you’ll want to quickly mute your audio. In that case, you have two options: reach for your mouse or touchpad and look for the “Mute” button, or use a quick keyboard shortcut to silence the noise immediately.
Zoom provides a comprehensive set of keyboard shortcuts that you can use before or during a videoconference. You can quickly join a meeting, mute and unmute the audio, start, pause, and stop recording, switch views from Speaker (a large image of the person speaking) to Gallery (several equally sized images, regardless of who is speaking), and perform a variety of other tasks by using these shortcuts.
In your Zoom app, you can easily find a list of those tasks as well as the shortcuts that you can use:
- Zoom’s settings can be accessed by clicking the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner.
- Select “Keyboard Shortcuts” from the left-hand menu.
Meeting, Chat, Phone, and General are the four categories in which the shortcuts are organized. To see all of the available keyboard shortcuts, open each category by clicking on the arrow to the right of the category name.
One thing to keep in mind: the keys you press on a Mac or a Windows PC will be different, but regardless of platform, those shortcuts can be extremely useful when you’re on a laptop Zoom call.