Draw on the live numbers, not on a screenshot

You are three minutes into a review and you need the room to look at one line. Not the whole table, that one line, the one that moved. So you say “third row from the bottom, the March column”, and half the room finds it and half the room is still counting rows. The moment you wanted, where everyone sees the same thing at the same time, is gone.

The usual fix is to prepare for it: screenshot the grid the day before, open an image tool, draw a red circle round the number, and paste the picture into a slide. That works, and it is out of date the moment a figure changes, and it cannot answer the question that comes next.

Present the grid itself

Lattice Grid has a mode you enter to present it. The grid takes the screen, scaled up so the back of the room can read it, and you drive it live. The mouse wheel scrolls through the content the way it always does, so you move to the part of the table the conversation has reached rather than to the part you guessed at last night. You can maximise the grid to give it the whole viewport. When you are done, Escape ends presentation mode and hands the page back.

Nothing here is a picture. The numbers on the screen are the numbers in the system, fetched when you opened it, so when somebody asks what changed you are already looking at the answer.

Draw on top without touching the data

Presenting is half of it. The other half is being able to point, in a way the whole room sees at once. Lattice Grid carries its own annotation tools, so there is no second app and no screenshot to mark up.

There is a pen for a freehand stroke, an arrow you drag from tail to point, a rectangle you drag round a block, and a highlighter that lays a wide translucent band under the text. Pick a tool and it stays live so you can lay down several marks, and the tool you are using shows visibly pressed, so you always know which one is in your hand. Click that same tool again and it turns off, so one button both starts and ends drawing. Escape does the same when you would rather not reach for the rail.

The important part is what the ink does not do. Annotations draw over the grid to guide attention. They do not change a value, move a row, or alter anything underneath. Ring the line that moved, arrow the outlier, box the quarter that is behind, highlight the total everyone should be reading, and the data is exactly as it was when you started. Clear the marks and the grid is untouched, because it was never touched.

Why this beats the marked-up screenshot

A red circle drawn on a screenshot is a decision made yesterday about what today will care about, and it is wrong as often as meetings go somewhere you did not plan. Drawing on the live grid moves that decision into the room. Somebody asks about a different line, you scroll to it, and you ring that one instead, on the current number, in front of everyone.

It also keeps the data in one place. When the thing you present is the real grid rather than an export of it, there is no second copy of the numbers going stale in a slide deck, and no ritual of rebuilding that deck before every review.

Your users get this because it ships in the grid. Nobody on your team builds a presenting surface, and nobody maintains the screenshot-and-annotate habit that currently stands in for one.

Read the docs and try presenting a grid you already have.