Control another participant's computer

- During a Zoom meeting, you can ask to remotely take control of another participant's computer. This is incredibly useful if you're helping somebody troubleshoot a problem on their computer. Instead of having to talk them through a series of steps, you can just take control and do it yourself. So I'm already in a Zoom meeting with Nick and I have that window minimized, so I can open that up. Hey, Nick. - Hello. - Thanks for helping me out again. So let's say that Nick is asking me to do something in Microsoft Excel that he's having trouble with. Rather than try to explain it as a series of steps or even over video like this, I can just ask him to give control of his screen to me. So the first thing that Nick has to do is share his screen. Now we saw how to do this earlier, but Nick if you go down to the bottom of your window and click share you'll see the options there and as we saw earlier, Nick can choose to share his entire desktop or just a specific app. If he chooses to share his entire desktop and I ask to take control, I'll be able to control his entire computer or if he prefers, he can just share the app that he needs help in, and I'll only be able to see and work in just that app. So for this example, Nick, why don't you just share Excel. You can see that he started screen sharing and there it is. I'm just going to minimize the video window here so we can see more of what's going on, but right now I don't have any control of Nick's screen. I can see his mouse cursor there and I move my own mouse cursor over that, but while he's sharing his screen I can now come up to the view options menu and I can request remote control. I get this dialog box and I'm going to click request. Nick will see that message on his end and he has to approve that before I can gain control and at the top it says you can control Nick Rozzi's screen. So now I do have control and I can click around in Excel. I can select different cells, I can maybe come up here and pop open the ribbon, but one thing I can't do is switch to any other application or see his desktop or anything else because I can only work in Excel because that's all he shared. Now at any time, Nick can also click the stop share button he sees on his screen to take away control from me or when I'm done, I can just come up to view options here and I can choose to give up remote control. Now I can still see his screen, but I can no longer control anything on it. All right Nick, you can stop sharing your screen for now. - [Nick] Okay. - All right, so that's how to take control of another user's computer. They have to share their screen first and then you have to request control. Now just so we can get the full idea of this, I'm going to have Nick request to control my computer so you can see what it looks like from this end. So I'm going to come down to share and this time I'm going to share my entire desktop. So with that selected, I'll click share. So he can see my screen now, and in a moment he should be able to request control of my computer. I can see the request has come through, I'll approve that and now I can see at the top that Nick is controlling my screen so he can switch to different apps, he can move things around, he basically has access to my entire computer. So just be aware that if you do share your desktop, they basically can get into your system preferences, they can get into all of your different apps and that might be okay, but you also want to be aware of that possibility. Now I do also maintain control on this end so I can move the mouse around myself and control things and if necessary, I can come up here and click stop share and that gives complete control back to me. All right so that's how to control another meeting participant's computer as well as how to allow your own computer to be controlled by another participant. Thanks again for helping me out, Nick. - No problem.