How to Start a Zoom Meeting

March 20, 2020
Valiant Technology
3 min

With so many more people working remotely, its important to be able to have virtual meetings and video conference calls. Zoom is a platform that is easy to use and has a free version available, so it’s a very common choice for meetings. Joining meetings doesn’t require an account at all, but if you have one, you can host meetings. Here is a guide on how to do both.

Download and Install Zoom

Open your computer internet browser and go to: https://zoom.us/download . After you go to the website, download the first option that you see : Zoom client for meetings.

After you have clicked on the download button, most internet browsers will show the the file being downloaded on the lower left corner of you screen. Click that to launch the installer.

Click this box to automatically install the application.

The installation is quick and will open up a Zoom window which you can use to join a meeting.

You can join a meeting without and invite, or sign in first to get the full feature set.

Joining a Zoom meeting

After you click on Join meeting, you will be prompted to enter your meeting ID and name. If you arrived at this window from a link to a Zoom meeting, you will only need to enter your name.

You can enter whatever name you want, but make sure your other meeting participants can identify you.

Below is what a typical Zoom invite information looks like. The meeting ID (the number you will need to join the meeting with) is the number that is under or next to where it says “Meeting ID” , if you do not see that, you can just look for the numbers that are in the end of the link under : “join zoom meeting”. The digits in the end of it is the meeting ID.

You will be prompted to join the meeting. Make sure you make your selections of whether to join with your own video input.

On the next screen it will ask you if you would like to join with computer audio (your microphone/headset) or through phone. Most computers/ cameras come with a microphone built in so you can just select computer audio and before pressing “Join with computer audio” click on ” test speaker and microphone” to make sure you are all set.

It’s a good idea to log in early and test your speaker and microphone before connecting.

Creating a Zoom meeting

First you must log into Zoom if you want to create a meeting. When logged in, the application will give you a few options.

To start a meeting immediately, click the new meeting button. This will instantly open a video meeting. You can invite people to join you at the bottom of the Zoom meeting or by copying and pasting your Zoom meeting link or meeting ID and sending it to people in another chat platform such as Teams, Slack, or Hangouts.

Instant meeting means I’m the only one here until I invite people.

You can plan a Zoom meeting ahead of time by clicking schedule. This will bring up the schedule form for you to fill out and allows you to invite people in advance.

There are a lot of options to chose from but the defaults are already selected for you.

More on Zoom

There are a lot of additional features to use in Zoom including screen sharing, recording meetings, and touch up my appearance. For more tips on how to optimize this application check out our Zoom Best Practices video.