Start a meeting

- There are a couple of different ways to enter or join a Zoom meeting. One way is to join a meeting that someone else has set up and invited you to. But in this movie, let's start by seeing how to create and host a meeting yourself. When you create a meeting, you're considered the host of that meeting. You're essentially the moderator, who's in charge and in control of the meeting settings and the abilities the participants have in that meeting. I'm currently logged into my account at Zoom.us. But you could also be using the desktop app which we saw how to download and install earlier. But basically, you can either start a meeting immediately or you can schedule a meeting for later. If I wanted to start a meeting right away I can come up here to HOST A MEETING and that gives me the choices of With Video Off, With Video On and Screen Share Only. These are pretty self-explanatory, but basically, you can choose to have a video conference with video on or an audio only conference or if you just need to show your screen while talking to people in the meeting you can choose Screen Share Only. Now, regardless of which option you choose you'll be popped over to the desktop Zoom app which I already have installed and running and the meeting will run in the app. If you haven't yet downloaded and installed the app you'll be prompted to do so. Really, you can save yourself a step by starting your meeting here in the desktop app. Here we can click New Meeting and a new meeting will start right away or you can click this arrow, next to New Meeting, and here I can decide if I want to have my video appear right away or I can uncheck that option to start my meeting without my video camera enabled. I'll go ahead and leave that unchecked for the moment so my video isn't a distraction while I talk about the other parts of the interface here. Notice there's now a slash through the camera icon here, indicating my camera will be off when I start my meeting. I'll click this to start my meeting. That pops open a window and then I'm prompted to decide where I want my audio to come from. If you have a microphone connected to your computer you can just choose Join With Computer Audio. If not, you can still hear audio from the meeting and attendees will be able to hear you if you switch over to Phone Call. Here you'll find the number to dial into as well as the Meeting ID number, which you'll need in order to join the call. In this case though, I'm going to switch back to computer audio. You can also check automatically join audio by computer when joining a meeting. If you don't want to be prompted about this every time you join a meeting. I'll click Join With Computer Audio. At this point, I'm actually in my meeting room but it doesn't look like it because my camera isn't on and there's no one else here. But I can come down here and click Start Video and now you can see me full-screen. But of course it isn't really isn't a meeting if there's no one else here, so I can come down here and click Invite, which opens up this window. From here I could invite people who are in my contacts or I could switch over to the Email tab and from here I could click one of these email options if I want to use my default email client or Gmail or Yahoo, depending on which one of these I use. Also down at the bottom here, we have Copy URL and Copy Invitation. If I didn't want to use any of these other options I could copy the URL or address of this meeting to paste into a text message or maybe through a Microsoft Teams or Slack message if I use one of those services. In this case I'll click Copy URL. I can see it's been copied my clipboard. Just so you can see with this looks like I'll open up TextEdit and here I'll just paste in that URL (computer keys clicking) and here you can see the address. This is the address of my meeting room and anyone who wants to join the room would need this address or at least these last numbers here at the end, which is your meeting ID. Now, my colleague Nick is standing by to join this meeting and I need to share this URL with him which I'm going to do over text. That'll take a few minutes for him to connect so we're just going to jump forward in time. (alarm dinging) And now Nick is connecting. In a second, yep there he is, hey Nick. - Hello. - Thanks for helping me out here. - No problem. - All right, so now Nick and I are in a meeting together. You'll notice that when you're in a meeting there are several controls here on the window that you can utilize during the meeting. Now, because I'm the host I have some controls that aren't available to Nick. We'll be talking about those in its own upcoming movie. For now, that's all I really wanted to look at. We'll be talking to Nick a little bit later throughout this course and we'll dive deeper into the options that are available then. Thanks again, Nick. - No problem. - We'll talk to you soon. all right, see ya. I'm going to click End Meeting and End Meeting for All. All right, so that's how to start a Zoom meeting.