Screensharing is a useful feature that allows you and your participants to share application windows or your/their desktop. This article illustrates how to share a screen on a Windows computer.

While mobile devices can view shared screens, they cannot share their own screens.

NOTE: Screensharing is limited to visual elements only. While you can play videos in a shared screen, the audio of that video may not be shared, depending on your mic. You may want to schedule a technical support session to test this before trying it with any clients.

You may also be interested in these articles:

• Screensharing: Mac computers
• Zoom Screensharing

1. Once you're in session, open an application window. (Any program; e.g., your internet browser, a PDF document, a PowerPoint presentation, etc.)

2. You can share either a single application window, or your desktop(s). 

• To share a single application window: in the upper right-hand corner will be a little green icon for VShare. Click on it. An orange border will appear around the application window that you're sharing, indicating what your participants can now see. The other parties will be able to move, resize, or minimize the share window just like any other window on their computer. (This will not affect your computer.)

An alternate way to windows, or to share your whole desktop, use the "Share" button that appears at the bottom of the participant window.

When the menu appears, select the window you would like to share, or click "Share Desktop".

If you have more than one monitor screen, you will need to choose which screen(s) to share: 

2. Whichever method you choose, a set of tools will appear at the top of the share window as a row of green tabs:

• Pen: Click on this tab to begin drawing using the pen tool with your mouse. (You will need to click on this tab again to stop drawing, or you will not be able to use your mouse to click other things.)
• Text: Click on this tab to create a text box that you can write in.
• Color: Click on this tab to change the color of the pen or text tool. (Color palette in the image below.)
• Erase: Click on this tab to immediately erase all of your markings.
• Disable Control: Between Windows computers, you have the option of taking remote control of a shared application (e.g., moving your cursor, typing things into the document, etc.). But as the sharer, you also have the ability to block your participants from doing this. Just click on this tab.
• Unshare: Click on this tab to stop sharing the application window.

The color palette looks like this:

Tip: When you share your screen, make sure the little push-pins at the top-right of your video tiles are not pushed in--if they are, some portion of what you're trying to share may be hidden by your own video tiles! (See this article for a note about pinning and unpinning video tiles.) 

This article was last reviewed by our Support team on October 2, 2020.