 If you use Zoom and Stream Deck on a Mac, then I think you're really gonna like this video. Hello, welcome to Take One Tech, my name's Alec, and I don't know about you, but in the past 18 months, I didn't think how many hours I've spent on Zoom. There was one weekend when I spent, I think it was 46 hours alone, just over three days on Zoom. So yeah, over the past 18 months, certainly I've racked up quite a few hours. It's just become so ubiquitous, hasn't it? It's become the way that most people are doing business these days in some form or another. It forms at least part of people's daily communication. So somebody asked me recently how I'm using specifically Stream Deck with Zoom, and I realized it's something that I haven't actually done a video about. So I thought I'd just put this video together because a lot of people know that there is a built-in Stream Deck plugin for Zoom, but the actions that you've got in that are actually quite limited, but there's a way around it where you can actually get access to basically all of the Zoom controls and have them ready at the touch of a button on Stream Deck. So that is what I'm gonna be talking about today. So what I'll do first is I'll come over to my Stream Deck and I'll just show you the built-in functionality that we've got with Zoom, and then I'll show you what I've done to sort of build on this as well. So here is my Stream Deck controller or application, I should say, and here what I've done is I've added in the Zoom controls. Now, just in case you weren't actually familiar with the Zoom plugin, I'll just quickly show you how to get to that. So basically you come over to the little icon just up at the top and you click on that one. That's the Stream Deck store. If by the way, you're not seeing this, then it means you haven't upgraded to the Stream Deck 5.0 software update, and that was released quite a while ago actually now, a couple of months, but I'm sure there's still some people who haven't updated. So do update your software and just to get to that, if you haven't done that already, then if you open up your preferences by clicking on the little cog wheel, just check here that you have got the something beginning with a 5 basically, and if not, click check for updates and you can update that. So assuming that you have done that and assuming that you've got this icon here, then if you click on that, it will open up the Stream Deck store. In fact, it'll start on this landing page here, but you come down to the plugins section and click on that. And then once you've clicked on that, just come up to the search box and search for Zoom. And once you do that, you'll see the Zoom plugin is there and available. And if you haven't got it installed already, there'll be a little install button there and click on that and it will add it into your Stream Deck application. And where it will appear is down the right hand side where all the other plugins are, and you'll have this one here, which is Zoom. Now when you open that up, there are a few different actions and I've added them all, but one over to my Stream Deck. And I'll show you what they all do. I mean, it says them there anyway, but I'll just read them down to you just in case because there is the mute button, toggle the mute on and off. There is the toggle the camera on and off. You've got this one to leave meeting or if you are the host, it ends the meeting for everybody. This one is to activate screen sharing. And so that will bring up the screen sharing window where you can just choose which particular part of the screen or application you want to share. This one is called Focus. Now what this does is if you have got a series of windows open and maybe you're doing a demonstration or something and you've clicked into some different apps, maybe Zoom has disappeared behind a few of the windows. Well, clicking this one will basically just bring the Zoom window back to the front and be the active application so you can get back to it in case you get lost somewhere in your desktop. These two are, if you are the host, you can use this one with a little speaker with a cross to mute all participants. And then this one will ask them all to come off mute. Now they have used a speaker icon there where technically I think it should be a microphone because you're muting them. You're not silencing the sound, but there you go, that's just me being finicky. Now these two here are basically to activate recording. And as you probably know, with Zoom you can either record to the cloud or you can record to a disk. So that is basically to activate recording there. So those are the controls that you have built in as a default in Zoom. But as you know, there are many more things that you may want to do with Zoom that this does not really cover. So what is the best way to do it? Unfortunately, Zoom has actually got us covered even if they hadn't created all of the controls and icons themselves because we have got this extra thing here which is custom shortcut. Now what this does is this allows you to activate any of the keyboard shortcuts for Zoom but do it in the background. Now what do I mean by that? Well, with most applications there are keyboard shortcuts as I'm sure you know but you do usually have to have the application that you want to use the shortcut for. It does have to be at the front. So if I want to open a new document in Excel, for example that would be Command N, but it only works if Excel is the actual front application. If I'm in Word and press Command N then it's going to open a new Word document instead. So those are basically application-specific shortcuts. Now there are a whole series of keyboard shortcuts in Zoom which I'll show you in a moment but the other way that you can do this is you can have global shortcuts which basically mean it's a keyboard shortcut that will activate something in an application no matter where you are in the system even if you have another application that is active. I don't personally like those too much because each time you use one of those it's basically taking out that possibility of using that keyboard shortcut for something else and there's more chance of things clashing. But anyway, let me show you how to find the keyboard shortcuts for Zoom. If you come into your Zoom panel here and go to your settings which is this little cog wheel up at the top corner when you click on that it will take you into the Zoom settings. Now at some point I'm going to do a video all about all of the different Zoom settings because there is a lot hidden in here, not really hidden but it's just quite a lot of different settings to go through and I think a lot of people aren't aware of them all and so there's things that can certainly make Zoom a better experience that perhaps you might not be aware of. So I'll get round to making that video at some point but for now we're actually just going to focus right down at the bottom we've got this keyboard shortcut section. So if I click on here what you'll see is there's actually quite a lot of potential keyboard shortcuts or actual keyboard shortcuts already built in to Zoom and you just have to learn these keyboard shortcuts and it can actually make your Zoom experience a lot better, especially if we link these up with our stream deck. Now the one thing that I was talking about just a moment ago was this global shortcuts. So for each of these shortcuts and let me just pick one at random so this one mute or unmute my audio the control for that is shift command A. So if I press shift command A when Zoom's open it will basically toggle mute on and off. Now I could make that enable a global shortcut and that would mean that even if I was demonstrating another application or something like that and I press command shift A then it would still work but as I say I don't really like to do that because it might clash with a keyboard shortcut in the other application but not to worry because this is where this extra little button that I just showed you comes in. So this button here basically allows you to activate any of those Zoom shortcuts even if they are not classed as global shortcuts but as long as you've got Zoom open this will just go and activate it in Zoom in the background which is exactly what we want. We want to know that when we press these buttons it's gonna do the action that we want within Zoom even if we are sharing a screen we're demonstrating another application or whatever it is we're doing. So that is where we are with that. All we need to do is we need to basically go into the settings and for each of these keyboard shortcuts that we may want we need to just go and add those into our stream deck. Now the way that this works by the way is not necessarily totally intuitive. It's not also that difficult either but one thing just to be aware of is when you are putting the keyboard shortcut in basically we come to give it a title so let me just choose one at random that is not already programmed in. So let me use this one invite and this the keyboard shortcut for that is Command I and that basically is when you've got a meeting running if you press Command I it will pop up a little thing to be able to give you all the meeting details so that you can forward that onto its own by email or something like that to invite somebody to the active meeting. So the way that we would add that in that keyboard shortcut which is Command I first of all let's just give it a title and call it invite. Don't worry we're gonna tidy this all up a lot. We'll call it invite just so that we know what it is and then we're gonna come down to the shortcut. Now this is where it's not necessarily the way that you might imagine. Most times when you're programming shortcuts in a stream deck in keyboard maestro or in other things you just actually press the keyboard shortcut so if I pressed Command I you'd expect that that would record it. Here what you have to do is actually physically type it. So it gives you an example where you type shift plus Command plus A or in our case it would be Command so we're literally writing Command and then we're using the plus symbol and then I. So that now has programmed this button to be the invite shortcut which is Command plus I and even if I had another application at the front and was using that then it would basically still activate. So that is exactly what we want. So now what I could do is I could just drag on a load of these shortcuts like this and then create shortcuts for all of those other different actions. You can see that the default icon for them is just this little keyboard symbol and then it does actually write it. It's a bit hard to read because it's a white writing on a white logo but it does actually have the title of the action there as well. But what would be much better is if we did actually have icons for all of these. Well, don't worry, I've got you covered. If I go now to this screen this is basically my Zoom screen and what I've done here is I've created actions for all of the different potential shortcuts that you might use in Zoom or all of the main available ones. There's a couple that I haven't actually included but these are all of the main available ones and I've created my own icon set for them and I've also corrected some of Zoom's icons but I'll come onto that in a moment. So what I'll do is I'll just run through what all of these icons do and these are available on my website so I'll talk about that at the end as well. But first of all, I'll run through the icon. So I've got two icons here which are basically just the Zoom logo and this would be for one maybe to open the Zoom application, one to activate the Zoom profile perhaps. So these are just basically two generic icons that are for either opening Zoom or opening your Zoom profile. This one, by the way, is just my standard home icon to get back to my home profile. If you're not sure what I'm talking about by home profile, I'll leave a link up in the top corner to a video all I did about how I use profiles on the stream deck. I don't use folders, I use profiles for each of my use cases and then I can just sort of easily jump between them and link to them from any other profile then. So it's a lot more versatile than folders but as I say, I'll leave a link to that up in the top corner. So the next four we've got along here, join, start, share and this one with a little calendar. Might give you a clue as to what it is. If you look at your Zoom application, you've got these four actions basically as a default on the front of the screen. This one normally would say start a meeting. It says back to meeting because I've got a meeting running in the background just to be able to demonstrate some of these things. So this would normally say start meeting and that's basically just gonna start a meeting in your default meeting room. So that is what that one is. This is basically here, this start one here. You've also got the option to join if you're gonna join somebody else's meeting. You've also got share screen. Now what that does is it joins a meeting but with a screen share. So a lot of people I don't think use that one as a sort of default but sometimes if you're joining with a specific computer just to be sharing screen and things like that, that is how you would do that. Then you've also got the schedule a meeting there as well. So those four actions that are basically before you're in actually even in the meeting, that's what these four are along the top. Join, start, share, and then this one with a little calendar is to schedule a meeting. Once you've started a meeting, that little example that I gave you earlier of using Commander I to actually get the invite details, that's what this one's for basically. It just grabs the invite for the meeting that's currently running so that you can send that off in a message or an email or whatever. Next one down, we've got the focus. So again, I have updated all of the icons. So some of these are still the built-in actions. So this is the first one that is one of the actual built-in actions. So this is that focus action but I've changed the icon just to be something more in the style of all of the others. And as I prefer it, which is basically a window with a zoom logo so that I know that that's basically to bring the zoom window to the front. Next one along is to maximize the zoom window to make it full screen. So sometimes I have it full screen and sometimes I wanna come off full screen. So this one toggles that on and off. This one is to activate the minimal zoom window it's called. So it just puts it into a small little box. So great if you are sharing your screen and you don't maybe have as much space on your screen and you want to just make the zoom window still be able to be visible and have it sort of floating but so that you can see more of your screen then that's a great way to do that. The next three are again, these are the two built-in ones that I told you about for recording to the cloud or to the disc but I have updated the icons for them. And in fact, these three here, they're all in a circle that these are of recording symbol, I guess. And then this one is recording to the cloud. This one is recording to a disc and then this one here is not a built-in action. It's one of the ones that I've activated with the keyboard shortcut. It's actually to pause. So you can start and stop recordings as they had built in but you can also pause the recording as well which some people may not be aware of. So you can just actually pause. So if you're having a meeting and you're recording it but then there's a break or something like that I've been in meetings that have lasted 16 hours, believe it or not. And yes, we do need comfort breaks and things like that. So you can actually pause the recording for that. Although usually we do split those longer ones down into much shorter chunks. But anyway, that's what that's for is to just pause the actual recording. This next one here with a picture of a window and then a series of little icons along the bottom is basically for the Zoom meeting controls. So when you hover over the window, you'll be familiar probably if you're a Zoom user how the controls at the bottom pop up that allow you to sort of mute, toggle your camera on and off, all these sorts of things and reactions and so on. Those will pop up from the bottom. Well, you can actually toggle those on to be persistent so that they just stay there all of the time. And so that's what this button's for. It basically just toggles them on so that they remain on all of the time. Next one is the leave meeting icon. I have redesigned it, although it's very familiar with the last one as well. It's just consistent with the color because I've changed the color slightly to the built-in ones. I've also corrected the issue with the mute participants showing a speaker rather than a microphone. Sorry to be pedantic. But here we've got the mute with the picture of a group of people, the participants and a microphone with a strike through it. And then here is the unmute version of that as well. Next in Zoom, you can change between the gallery view and the speaker view. So this button here toggles between those two. We've got a sort of line through it with a sort of gallery over onto what bottom corner and then the speaker on the top. So you can just sort of toggle between those two different views using that button. I'm often in meetings where there is more than 25 people, believe it or not. In fact, sometimes there is five or six screens of people in some of the meetings that I've been in of late. And so you do want to be able to scroll through to see the different people in the gallery sometimes. And so that is what these buttons are for. These two here is basically to go to the previous screen full of participants. And this one is to go to the next screen of participants. So again, only useful if you're in big meetings, but that is what those icons do. This one here brings up the list of participants. So there is a little floating window that you have in Zoom that you can activate, which basically just lists all of the different people that are on the meeting. So that's what that button does there. It just activates that window. When you have somebody who is sharing their screen, you can actually request control of the screen so that if you are trying to demonstrate something or you want trying to explain something to somebody, maybe troubleshooting on their screen, you can say, hey, let me take control of your screen and I'll show you how to do it. For example, well, that is what these two buttons are for. This one here is to request control. And then once you've got control of somebody's screen and you've shown them what you need to and you want to release that control, then you can just press this one and it will release the control. This one here is just the mute. It's just the same as the other one. But again, I've just slightly redesigned it. And then if you toggle it on and off, then this one has two states. So most of these are, although some of them technically are toggles, only the ones that are built in can actually have two different icons to show you the different states. So you can see here that this demonstrates that the microphone is muted. And then if I press it again, it will unmute the microphone and show it as not muted. So that's what that is for. This next one here is the only one that is not actually a built in, one of these custom shortcuts from Zoom. This is actually the push to talk button. So if you are on mute in a Zoom call and you press the space bar, it actually unmutes you temporarily for you to be able to speak, push to talk. And then when you take your finger off the space bar, then it releases it again. So it's just if you're in a meeting and everyone's muted and you just wanna chip in with something briefly and you're not gonna be talking for a long time, then just pressing the space bar will allow you to just talk momentarily. And then as soon as you release the space bar, it will release that again. Well, sometimes, depending on what's going on and what I'm doing in a meeting, then sometimes I don't necessarily have my keyboard right in front of me. I might have my stream deck and a notepad or something like that. Or I might even not be right at the computer doing some presenting or something like that. So depending on what is actually going on, it is useful to have this as a button on the stream deck. So this is, as I say, the only one that isn't a Zoom action. And basically what this is doing is it is a multi-action, a stream deck multi-action. And all it's done is it's got two different actions here. The first one is to make Zoom the active application. So all that is as I've done open and then Zoom as the application. So what that does is if Zoom is already open, it just brings it to the front, which is what we want. And then it's a system hotkey and I've got it to push and hold the space. So basically as long as you hold down the key, the stream deck key, then it will simulate holding down the space key. So it's basically going to Zoom and then holding down the space key. So that is basically the push to talk button. The next one is the camera to toggle the camera on and off. So again, this is basically just the video toggle here, that button, but I've just changed the icon to match all of the others. And then this has got two states as well. So for press it, it's either on or off. So if it's off, it's got a line through it. And then if it's on, it's just the normal regular button. And next one along is to toggle cameras. So this is another thing. If you've got multiple different cameras, then you can actually just cycle through them. So that is what you would do here. Just press this button to toggle between different cameras. Next one we've got is screen sharing. And again, that is the same as this one, the share toggle, but I've just made it more clear. It is the screen share. And then also the next one along is one of the custom shortcuts. And that is for pausing screen sharing because a lot of people don't realize you can actually do that in Zoom. If you are sharing your screen in Zoom and you want to hold the particular image that is on the screen, then you can just press the pause button. And so for all of the participants, they will just see that image persisting on their screen. This is great for a couple of things. First of all, if there's something with moving images or something moving on the screen and you just wanna stop it for either to stop it being a distraction or you just wanna stop something at a particular point, then you can use that pause function. The other great thing about this is if you are doing a screen demonstration and you've got sort of various different things that you want to demonstrate, you can pause on one thing and then you can go and set up something else on the screen while that other thing is still on the screen. So it's a bit like if you use Ecamm Live, and I'm making an assumption here, but if you use Ecamm Live, then you might be familiar with their preview mode, which is basically the same thing. It allows you to be broadcasting one thing, but you've got something else on your screen. So say you're showing something in Excel, but then you also wanna show a website. You could have your Excel page up and then you could press pause and then you close down Excel or minimize it, bring your Safari to the front, queue up the page that you want to show on that and then press the pause button again to unpause and then it would start broadcasting again with your full screen with the now Safari window on it. So that is how I use the pause function. The last couple are the raise hand. So if you are in big groups, as I have been quite often, then you will need to sometimes raise your hand to be polite. So this is the button to do that. It will basically just activate the raise hand in Zoom. And then the final one here is to open the chat window. So if you click this, it would just open up the chat window. So those are the controls that I've created and those are the icons I've created. Now the good thing about Stream Deck is you can actually export profiles. So what I've done is to make these available is I've actually uploaded them to my website. So you can go and download them there for $10. And it's basically all of these different icons. And in fact, let me just show you what it looks like on the website itself first. So I will obviously leave a link to this in the description below. But if you go to my website and then go into the store, I'll obviously leave a direct link. But if you go to the store, you can find it that way as well. First of all, my little disclaimer, talking about how you can make all these icons yourself and showing you some resources for where I show you how to create them. But if you don't wanna bother with that and you'd rather just get going straight away with the icon set, then you'll find them. They'll be right at the top here, the complete Zoom icon and profile pack for Stream Deck. And it shows you the sort of little preview of what the icons look like. There's some other icon packs for Stream Deck there as well. But for now, this is the one that we're talking about. Now what I've actually done is I have actually created a, basically let me just show you what happens when you click on it. So if you click on here, it will give you a bit more information about it, linking to this video. And then there's add to the cart. And then what you'll notice is that once you add it to the cart, then your little cart will appear down at the bottom corner here. So you can just click on that and then that will basically allow you to download it. Now, once you download it, it's gonna download a zip file. And once you unzip the zip file, what you'll find, if I just open this up, is we've got basically a folder like this. And the folder is basically all of the icons so that you can use them manually and drag them in or use them in other instances for other applications perhaps. But I've also down here actually got the Stream Deck profiles as well. So you don't have to go through and set this all up manually. All you need to do is there's basically two versions. I've got the Stream Deck Zoom icons, the Excel Stream Deck, which is the one I use because there is 31 of them altogether. So they do fit all onto the 32-button Excel. So if you were to add this one into your Stream Deck Excel, basically it would look exactly like that one that I just showed you. But if you've only got the regular Excel, then I've split it into two different profiles. So you just load both of those in and then you can sort of go and pick and choose which particular ones you want. Because you may not want them all, you might not be doing meetings with 100 people on things like that. So there may be a very well be the case that you only need a few of them. And so by having them in two different profiles, you can basically just, in fact, let me quickly show you this, you can basically just copy them out of those profiles. So one second, if I come into here and I go to my different Stream Deck, I've got one for my mobile that is just an example. So here is basically what the Stream Deck Icons one profile looks like and it's got all of these. You might think that you don't actually need this share one. So you could just delete that. You might not need this one, so you could delete it. But you can also copy between profiles. So you might want to create your own. So if I create a new profile, then we just delete this one. That's just the unusual welcome one. And if I come back into here, you might think, okay, I want this one to be able to mute all of my participants. So you just press Command C to copy the action over and then come over to your new profile, which was this one, I think, and then just come here and then Command V. So you can just copy over whichever one you want. So it would be a case of loading up profile one and two into your Stream Deck and then just copying them across. The only one, by the way, because there was 31 and this is a 15 button Stream Deck, the only one that isn't included in those two is actually the one to leave meeting. But basically, you just add that in there and then you just come over to your Icons because it's one of the easiest ones to do. You just come over to your Icons that you've downloaded and then somewhere in here, there is one for leave meeting, which is this one. And so you would just add that in. As you can see, it's already got the icon which is almost the same anyway, but if you really did want the colors to be an exact match, then you just simply drag that over onto there and then you could see it's just updated that icon. So that is how you would get those into your Stream Deck and that is basically how you can program your Stream Deck to activate all of the different controls of Zoom. So obviously I am making these available on my website. It's taken me a bit of time to do them, hence there is a little bit of a cost to them, but you can do this all yourself using that method that I showed you and you may not even want all of them. You could just go and create the few extra ones that you do need. So I hope you found that useful and if you've got any other ways that you're using Stream Deck with Zoom or any of these that I may have missed out, if you do end up downloading them or have a look at them, then do let me know about those as well. I'm always interested to hear how other people are doing things because there's always more than one way to do these things, isn't there? If you have found it useful though, obviously, then don't forget to go and like the video and subscribe. In the meantime, I'll leave some more Stream Deck videos over on the right hand side. Have a great day.