I made a personal note during Kendal Van Dykes presentation on XML in SQL Server to ask him what tool he was using to zoom in on his text during his demos yesterday at SQL Saturday. I expected to find out about a tool that I would have to shell out a few dollars for, but instead Kendal was actually using a free tool from Microsoft SysInternals called ZoomIt.
After downloading this tool tonight to play with it, I feel it is definitely worthy of a blog posting. I know that a few people who read my blog also do presentations on SQL Server for their local user groups as well as for larger events, and this tool in my opinion is simply amazing. A lot of times, I try to remember to set my font sizes in Management Studio to at least 14 points or larger so that the text is readable on the projected screen. Saturday morning however, I missed setting the results text to a larger size and the resulting 8 point font was impossible to read even standing at the podium in front of the room. To fix this would have meant closing down Management Studio and restarting it, which would have put even more dead space in my presentation than I already had due to a few demonstrations that would not run.
If you do any kind of public presentations, I highly recommend downloading this tool for use. Many thanks to Kendal for letting me know about it after his session.
True props go to Jim Blizzard - he told me about it when I saw him use it at OPASS a few months ago. I just payed it forward.
ReplyDeleteDefinitely comes in handy during presentations!