How to highlight your cursor and draw on screen while screen sharing

Make the pointer easy to follow

The simplest fix is built in. In Settings → Accessibility → Mouse pointer and touch, raise the pointer size and pick a bright colour — a large lime or magenta pointer survives video compression far better than the default white arrow. In Settings → Bluetooth & devices → Mouse → Additional mouse settings, the Pointer Options tab can show the pointer's location when you press Ctrl.

Click highlights and a spotlight: PowerToys

Microsoft's free PowerToys include mouse utilities made for exactly this:

• Mouse Highlighter (Win+Shift+H) marks every left and right click on screen, so viewers see where you clicked.
• Find My Mouse dims the screen around the pointer when you press Ctrl twice — a spotlight on demand.
• Mouse Pointer Crosshairs (Win+Alt+P) draws crosshairs centred on the pointer, handy on very large or very busy screens.

Draw and zoom: ZoomIt

ZoomIt, from Microsoft's Sysinternals team and part of PowerToys since 2025, is the classic presenter tool on Windows: Ctrl+1 zooms in on part of the screen, Ctrl+2 lets you draw over a frozen copy of the screen, Ctrl+4 zooms while the screen keeps moving, and Esc ends any of them. It is free and very light. The trade-off is that drawing works on a frozen copy, so you cannot keep working in the app while your annotations are up.

The meeting apps' own tools

Zoom has Annotate on its screen-sharing bar, with a pen, shapes, text and a spotlight arrow. Teams can switch on collaborative annotation over a shared screen, and has a laser pointer and pens when you present a PowerPoint file through PowerPoint Live. Google Meet's annotation tools are limited to some paid Google Workspace plans. Each works only inside its own app, so if you present on more than one platform, a tool that draws on Windows itself behaves the same in all of them.

Draw over any app while it keeps working: ScreenFeel's presenter

ScreenFeel's presenter tools draw on a transparent layer over every application — the native Zoom or Teams client, a terminal, a slide deck — so they appear in any screen share on any platform:

• Cursor glow: a high-contrast halo, focus falloff and a ripple on every click. It is click-through, so every click still lands in the app underneath.
• Box and Arrow: drag to draw a spotlight box or an arrow straight onto the screen.
• Fading ink: write freehand and watch the stroke melt away after two to ten seconds, so there is nothing to clear between points.

Nothing switches itself on: only the tool you press starts. The presenter's own toolbar is excluded from screen capture, so the audience sees your marks but not the buttons. When a video-call window is open, ScreenFeel also checks your other window titles for anything that looks like a secret, because screen-share pickers show those titles to everyone on the call.

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