Free Zoom/screen sketch win 10 tool ZoomIt & To Do note app.

Watching YouTube vids I see people zooming in on their screens to highlight a specific part of the screen, which is usful sometimes, I think its done on Mac’s. I’ve wondered about a Windows tool that will allow you to Zoom in to part of the screen, also sketch on the screen and to clear it as well.

ZoomIt

There is a free tool for that, ZoomIt. There is a video about it, and it goes through all the aspects of the tool, rather slowly in my opinion, but very comprehensively:

Fast Keys

Ctrl + 1 takes you to zoom mode, you can preset your zoom level by going into setting is the Taskbar Tray:

Once you are in the Zoom mode you can then click left mouse button to go into Draw mode and with Ctrl + Left Mouse draw a box, Sht+ Left Mouse is a line & Ctrl +Sht+Left mouse an arrow, starting at arrow head.

Esc gets you out of the programme, “E” cleans the screen of what you’ve drawn & “W” gives you a white screen, “K” a black screen, and “T” gives you text.

You can save the screen markup by using Ctrl + C and then Ctrl + S (Copy/Save) and then give a file name and it will give you a PNG image file of your screen.

For colours R=red, B= blue, Y= yelow, G = green & P= Pink, also hold down Ctrl & scroll wheel of mouse to get bigger or smaller dot/line size.

For other fastkeys watch the video above, that goers through a lot more of the functionality of it.

Free Microsoft To Do

SuperNote is Ok, also I tried SimpleNote (which ia free), that was OK as well, then I came across MicroSoft To Do that has extra functionality over the other 2 notetaking apps mentioned.

You can add dates to it, also there are a few ways of ordering/sorting your notes and also it has an interface to other MicroSoft products. Its not too fussy but not that smooth to use.

A few negatives, 1/ No dark mode, 2/ It takes a while to load in the browser. I haven’t tried the app yet on the PC, for present I’ll stay with the browser version, 3/ You add your task then have to go to the right side to add other information about it.

End comment

I’ve definitely got a use case or ZoomIt and I find it intuitive to use. I’ll be using it a bit more in future.

Microsoft To Do I’m not so sure about but will try and practice with it to see if it meets my needs. I like the idea of calendar to set dates for some of my tasks and I will get some reminders for those. It will allow for some prioitisation, which is a function that I need. I would also like a seperate folder for projects I do not want to do straight away.