Implementing Professional Design Principles in Your PowerPoint Presentations

In a recent article in InfoWorld, Microsoft's Ballmer suggests (threatens?) that "Enterprise XP holdouts will get hell from users".  I disagree, for reasons I write about in an upcoming article.

In his piece Michael Horowitz seems to echo many of the points I made in "Nobody Asked Me But... (What I Want in the next versions of Office and Windows) and a soon to be published piece:  Microsoft to Users:  You Need to “Survive” an Update.  I also began this topic in the summer of 2007, with a blog post entitled "Where's the Revolution?"

Michael takes a bit of a different slant but both of us, from the end user perspective rather than from Microsoft's, see the new versions as causing much grief and frustration with little in the way of real improvement.  By the way, I have no axe to grind; like many of you I am bonded with Microsoft and have no easy path to Mac or OpenSource.  But we all have a stake in not continuing the madness.

Here is the beginning of his piece: 

"Microsoft has made, what I think are, mistakes in changing the user interfaces on their two most important products, Windows and Office. Each is doing it's best to drive away existing customers. The techies at Microsoft seem to lack an understanding of the needs of normal people and thus may have started the company on its inevitable decline."

Various Microsoft enthusiast sites were buzzing on Thursday about purported screenshots of Office 14, which is in early testing.

A Russian site, wzor.net, put up a bunch of screenshots of the individual products that make up the suite, as well as an about page and start menu that seem to show a whole lot of Office 14 products are on the way.

Interesting articles at InfoWorld about the challenge of Google Apps to the enterprise.

My question is how much Microsoft may be hurting itself by releasing new versions that make end users struggle to adapt.  In my opinion, Google Apps simplicity in addition to price may be its big attraction.

Lisa Schmeiser has a short but interesting piece about which aspects of IT are still in high demand during the recession.

Tom Kanishige has written an in interesting piece on how to make your IT resume shine.  Good for New Years' resolutions.

Read it all.

While I wasn't able to make it to this year's Professional Developers Conference, I was interested in the potential evolution of the suite to encompass web applications.  Desire Athow of ITPortal.com provides an interesting overview of how this strategy was presented.

By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service - Blog posting by Microsoft employee calls for people to be part of a technology adoption program to test the monitoring and analytics components of Office PerformancePoint Server

IT staff jobs are at increasing risk -- both for contractors and in-house workers -- according to a survey of top CIOs by Goldman, Sachs & Co released last week. Global services companies will also feel the pinch because of the slowing economy.

the latest corporate customer for Google’s hosted office suite Google Apps Premier Edition.

The publisher of The Daily Telegraph will migrate 1,400 seats over to Google’s enterprise version of its business productivity software before the end of this year, after successfully completing a trial with 10 per cent of its users during May and June.

Microsoft is offering an online version of Office along with OneCare security for $70/year - it's called Equipt and will be read later this month.

There is a short article on the ComputerWorld web site about a reference to the next version of Office posted on an MS web site and later removed.

Do we need two open source office suites? by ZDNet's Dana Blankenhorn -- Do we really need two open source office suites?

To  me it is amazing that people are actually wondering what Microsoft is hatching for Windows 7; I guess in some ways there is a parallel in waiting hopefully for a new OS and a new administration in Washington.

But after dealing with the sloth, lack of compatibility and outright idiocy of Windows Vista (new ways to reprogram yourself to do almost everything) I guess some people are anxious to go through the process – again.

Nice feature at Tech Republic:  "Moving from a purely technical net admin role to a managerial position can be a long and winding road full of pitfalls. Steven Crane has become quite familiar with that road during his long career in the IT industry.

For eight years, he was an IT manager for major blue chip “fast moving consumer goods” (FMCG) companies such as Gillette and Parker Pen. In that time, Crane faced and overcame many management challenges."

According to Mary Jo Foley -- Systems administrators: Mark your calendars. Microsoft is going to start pushing the first service packs for Office 2007 and SharePoint 2007 next month.

Technical skills may never die, but areas of expertise wane in importance as technology advances force companies to evolve and IT staff to forsake yesterday's craft in favor of tomorrow's must-have talent.

I found a ditty in my email this week from PC Magazine that Bill Gates is "superenthused" about the impending release of Windows 7 in early 2010.

Visio Pioneer Chris Roth to Offer Visio Best Practices for D-Tools SI Users 

InfoWorld has an interesting article on using Windows Server 2008 as a workstation or Vista alternative.

In a series of benchmark tests ZDNet compared Vista SP1 to XP SP2.  (Hint:  XP won - check the graphs on page 5)

Ed Bott at ZDNet details what's under the hood of Vista's first service pack. 

Microsoft has published documentation on what is in the new service pack for Vista.

CNET's Elsa Wenzel offers a thoughtful commentary on the new web based applications and whether they pose a threat to shrink wrapped software.

I've complained about Vista before but these two examples of file transfer and DVD burning are ridiculous

InfoWorld has a comprehensive article about your options for getting Windows XP after this year's June 30 cutoff.  link

While many of us are scratching our heads about Vista, others are speculating on the next Windows

Probably in time for the upcoming Visio Conference in Redmond I am told the Toolbox site, which we covered recently, is updated.  Have a look here.

Steve Blass of Network World comes up with a great tip for PowerPoint Users on large format printing.

Information available from ZD Net on how to fight Excel security vulnerabilities in Office 2003

Backup and move your OneNote Notebook with a single file.

OneNote 2007 has a huge number of pre-set tags, or you can create your own with Customize.

When you flag items in OneNote as Tasks, you can instantly send them into Outlook where they are calendared Tasks.

With OneNote installed you can use the Tools menu in Internet Explorer to send any web page to OneNote

You can add a SideNote item to the System Tray that instantly opens a OneNote Window

Use the Tools > Customize Feature of Outlook to create a button that sends a selected message to Junk Mail and blocks the Sender

You can either use the pre-set Outlook Search Folders or create your own to organize you items and email

Outlook 2007's new color categories are a great way to sort and filter contacts, tasks and email

You can review your most important calendar appointments and tasks instantly in the To-Do Bar.

Outlook 2007 has an RSS Aggregator that lets you view RSS feeds and subscriptions in you Email folders

The Visio ShapeSheet is one of the most powerful features of the program - learning it can accelerate your productivity immensely.

A very effective way in Visio of making a complex diagram easier to understand is placing items on different layers and making them visible or invisible depending upon the situation.

Using the Visio Timeline template is a great way to summarize a project visually.

In Visio 2007 there are three options to automatically connect shapes in your diagram and space them evenly.

In Access 2007, Forms and Reports can be quickly reformatted using the pre-set galleries in the Design view and Design Tools.

If you want to quickly see all of the powerful features of PowerPoint and apply them to your own presentation(s), use a template pre-set that contains them all.

Besides multiple masters, PowerPoint 2007 also has a set of layouts attached to each master.

If you liked WordArt before you'll love it in PowerPoint 2007 - you can apply PhotoShop like effects to text.

PowerPoint 2007 has a quick way to turn boring bullets into more meaningful SmartArt diagrams.

If you want to convey information visually, the new SmartArt diagrams in the Insert tab can provide a wide array of options.

Themes are a quick way to make your worksheet or document look different quickly, and particularly to apply a different set of colors and effects to a graphic element, like a chart.

In Excel 2007 the Pivot Table feature has been made a lot easier and it's a great way to look at your data from a different perspective.

Excel 2007's new conditional format, available in the Insert tab, can visually highlight important data and made it easier to analyze and present.

In Excel 2007 the Design tab when you select a chart lets you instantly choose a different layout for the chart without doing a lot of reformatting.

If you are missing something from the Ribbon in the Office 2007 apps, you can add it to the Quick Access Toolbar.

Word 2007 has taken a page from E-Book with full screen reading view

Check out the References tab to apply professional styles and manage sources

The Developer tab on the Ribbon is optional, but you can enable it using the Office Button and clicking options for the program you are using.

The Insert tab on the Ribbon lets you quickly add QuickParts to your document or save a block of text as a new QuickPart

Use Word 2007 to compare versions and make changes to similar documents.

From Computerworld comes an expert consultant's take on upgrading to Office 2007

Following up to a recent post, it seems that the people are rebelling against having Vista shoved down their throats.

Read about fixes for this Excel problem covered in an earlier blog.

Excel Newsgroup Member IDs bug in Excel 2007

ZDNet has an interesting article on the effects of the beta of SP1 for Vista on those contemplating deployment.

Is anyone else fed up with new OS and Office adjustments?