Office

Aug 21 2008   2:47PM GMT

Experience the Office Enhancements Directly from the Labs, Not Bill’s Shows Any More

Posted by: William Peterson
Business, Google, YouTube, Microsoft, Office, Office 14, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, SharePoint, Presentation, professional, Review, Solutions, Technology

Like all Gfans can reach Google’s technology playground at Google Labs, we the guys who’re usually working on Microsoft’s Office suites have the opportunity to explore the productivity horizon as well. Microsoft^® Office Labs is such the community directly from its technical labs for the fans to try, experience, and discuss.

Here I recommend two great artworks from the so-called labs.

pptPlex
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/pptPlex
An amazing PowerPoint 2007 add-on. It makes your PowerPoint 2007 presentations showing on an Interactive Canvas. You and all audience will be really inspired by the new thinking of presentation performance in PowerPoint 2007. You may check a video guide at YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YvsdRFRBxhA.

Search Commands
http://www.officelabs.com/projects/searchcommands
Totally handy tools for Office users. Search Commands helps you find commands, options, wizards, and galleries in Microsoft Office 2007 Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Just type what you’re looking for in your own words and click the command you need.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Aug 11 2008   3:38AM GMT

Your Office at Work: Fresh Resource Center inside Microsoft Office

Posted by: William Peterson
Business, CIO, Microsoft, Office, Office Live, Learning, Presentation, Technology, Tips

Not only you, I’m engaged to Microsoft’s Office at Work, which is far more than some hints and tips for those office applications. Because the contents there are really helpful in our daily office life. We can not miss those great ideas to stuff:

• A popular article from Office Hours on ninja tricks you can perform
• An introduction to readability stats
• A review of phishing and other email warnings
• Updated Excel tips (the most popular program folks are looking for hints on this page)
• Most e-mailed templates (based on email this link data)
• A link to our own comic, Office OFFline
• Plus keeping last month’s most popular article, PowerPoint without bullets

The best part here is, you’ll find the resources you want to see on different prospects, such as Office at Home, Office at School, Office at a Small Business.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Aug 5 2008   3:07AM GMT

New Presentation Technology in Review: Thank MVP Geetesh on FlashPPT

Posted by: William Peterson
Business, Development, Flash, Microsoft, Office, PowerPoint, PowerPoint 2007, Learning, Live, Presentation, professional, Review, Technology, Tips

In early twenty-first century, I devoted myself into the presentation innovations, shaking up a business practice were settled to the future. Quite a few of my thoughts may come out as I also like to dig more on Microsoft PowerPoint. Yet Microsoft MVPs (Most Valuable Professionals) in PowerPoint have their own opinions on the experienced presentation skills. I really appreciate their works in practice. Here I recommend MVP Geetesh’s latest professional reviewing and ranking for the Flash/PowerPoint mixed tools on his FlashPPT site. You’ll find the technical details about the PowerPoint to Flash presentation (http://www.flashppt.com/blog/).

Also, you may like the presentation guru Geetesh Bajaj’s another presentation site Indezine (http://www.indezine.com/) and his PowerPoint Blog (http://www.indezine.com/blog/), which contain more nice PowerPoint templates and a lot of presentation resources for everyone.

One thing I need to claim, I’m not Microsoft MVPs only the IT presentation concerned businessman. So I just think that improving presentation skills is important for modern guys with new presentation technologies to make the business world easier. We don’t need to be the PowerPoint MVP, but we appreciate all efforts of the MVPs to help us become the MVP in our own field with better presentation skills. Thank all MVPs.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Jul 20 2008   9:02AM GMT

Do We Really Need Microsoft Office? No in the Past and Future

Posted by: William Peterson
Business, Enterprise, Google Docs, Corporate, Online Apps, OpenOffice, Microsoft, Office, Learning, Presentation, professional, Review, Solutions, Technology

Yesterday I read the an article “Do I Need to Buy Microsoft Office?” at Ask a Geek of latest Popular Science. As the its result of “Our geek weighs the options and finds Office might not be the best bet”, I agree that Microsoft Office’s rivals are really powerful and nice, such as Google Docs, OpenOffice or Corel’s WordPerfect Office suite. On my personal side, I would rather choose Google Docs, whether Google would charge me some fees or not in the future. But most businesses nowadays must have the Microsoft Office suite installed, while IBM extremely loves his Lotus Notes software as exception.

In the future, desktop software will be completely replaced with Web applications without doubts. So Microsoft Office is certainly the product for current days. But we can not rush to the future without it because of its popularity in the past. Because a lot of people are working with it now, and will work with it in the future for a long time. In order to avoid any bad incompatibility, our business must have and manage it. Just think about, you partner sent you a document in DOCX format, but you cannot read the contents properly with your OpenOffice, and you will ask for another PDF copy? That’s also why a huge enterprise IBM can not abandon its ever popurlar used Lotus Notes easily.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Jun 1 2008   7:39AM GMT

Quick Tips to Enhance Your Presentation in PowerPoint 2007

Posted by: William Peterson
PowerPoint 2007, Microsoft, Office, PowerPoint, Presentation, professional, Technology, Tips

After your meticulously constructed the contents of next-day presentation, enrichment is great for your confidence. Applying some quick enhancements to your presentation is really easy, because you’ll find PowerPoint 2007 has made them ready for you.

1. Themes offer you more thoughts

Access the Design tab of the Ribbon in PowerPoint 2007, the Themes gallery provides several themes here with thumbnail previews, and you can just hove your mouse cursor over and get live preview with new theme in current presentation.

Furthermore, the built-in theme colors are very friendly feature to help you make professional design. Fonts, Effects are also already selected by designers, and what you need is just a few clicks.

2. Quick Styles is what you want

In Drawing section of Home tab, you can decorate the selected contents with this fascinating idea: just live preview and apply preset style in mouse hover and clicks. That’s why it called “Quick”.

Like theme feature, the preset style or layout is well designed. Everyone can easily access it and make a professional-like presentation.

3. Use SmartArt in smart

SmartArt is so cool that everyone will like it. Actually it just provides the quick way to make designer-quality graphics from preset templates, as better graphics can essential promote your presentation.

You may create one from SmartArt icon of Insert tab, and simply all the boring listing, process, cycle, relationship contents into a smart and bright view. That’s SmartArt simply did for you.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

May 24 2008   3:00AM GMT

PowerPoint 2008 for Mac Than iWork Keynote ‘08, You Think That?

Posted by: William Peterson
Keynote, iWork, Apple, Business, Office, PowerPoint, Mac, Microsoft, Presentation, professional, Review, Technology

As not a loyal Apple fan, I just ever tested PowerPoint 2008 for Mac and iWork Keynote ‘08 for gadgets when Microsoft made its campaign, and found no significance on their comparison. Yet months later I solemnly read the details of Macworld’s article of PowerPoint 2008 vs. Keynote ‘08: The Office Suite Smackdown by Franklin N. Tessler, I realized that this was really a good point. Because there’s no clear winner in the rivalry, and PowerPoint 2008 may have surpassed in several areas; however, Keynote ‘08 caught the favor from Mac users upon Apple’s reputation. Is this what you think so?

Read that interesting article on the Macworld’s site …

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Apr 21 2008   8:48AM GMT

Criticize the Top Players of Web Presentation in Flash: authorSTREAM, SlideShare and Google

Posted by: William Peterson
Google, Business, YouTube, Flash, Google Apps, Online Apps, Web, Office, PowerPoint, Presentation, professional, Review

After authorSTREAM continuously sent the e-newsletter “PowerPoint on iPod and YouTube” to me and all others, I had a glimpse of its new campaign upon popular elements. It got me thinking about the current Web presentation services on Web 2.0. It might be easy to find that most palyers on the stage build their Web presentation system on Flash platform, and promote the idea as community like YouTube. Whatever how many sites follow the fad to provide Web presentation services, most of them don’t catch the real feeling of Web 2.0. Here I just express my initial thinking to the well-done Flash projects on the Web presentation stage. Anyway, feel free to think through some of your own in the comments.

. Google Docs by Google. Firstly, to be fair, Google always offers various Web freebies as most peoples preferred, so I cannot judge a Web search engine provider with any presentation related critics. But under its well-known brand and Web technologies, Google Docs could be really great alternative to Microsoft Office Suite, especially with its better documents compatibility recently. Meanwhile, the defects are obvious: animation effects, crashed scripts and limited features. For most exsiting Google users, the ability within one universal Google account is certainly easy to use.

. authorSTREAM by authorGEN. Before its athorSTREAM promoted to me, I have knew its producer authorGEN as its leading in multimedia presentation solution. The company of authorGEN has produced authorPOINT, which creates professional presentation for business and e-learning from PowerPoint. Upon the stable technology of PowerPoint presentations to online Flash shows, authorSTREAM made a rapid growth on the Web presentation stage. The promotion idea with popular elements blogs, iPod and YouTube included also sounds great. Actually its presentation technologies are really advanced, that is, the animated slids and embedded audio would be the fair point as so far.

. SlideShare by SlideShare. It launched the service early, and the community is generally popular upon the well-done construction and promotion these years. As the king of Web presentation service, its entire community system including slideshow sharing, rating and additional features does no wrose than how YouTube works. Moreover, its affiliation on Facebook as one integrated online application (http://apps.facebook.com/slideshare) leads better attractions. However, unfortunately it didn’t provide plentiful office features like Google Docs, or enhanced presentation abilities like authorSTREAM. But really like YouTube community, it cannot stop its popularity on the stage.

Well, that’s the quick review I came up with. Like most users, I’m not sure there’s a real toplist there, but it doesn’t mean I can’t make some nice opinions. By the way, you may have a look at Google’s presentation in Flash about Q1 2008 Quarterly Earnings Summary on SlideShare’s Slideshow of the Day.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran

Mar 19 2008   11:54AM GMT

Gonna Catch Up: OpenOffice.org 2.4 Release Candidate

Posted by: William Peterson
Office, OpenOffice, Enterprise, Channel, PowerPoint, Microsoft, Presentation, Review

The open-source office application suite, a free alternative to Microsoft’s ubiquitous Office, is nearing final release on version 2.4. With OpenOffice.org on track to launch version 3.0 later this year. OpenOffice.org continues to evolve. As practice makes perfect, in the coming version, its interface continues to develop into almost a twin of MS-Office’s pre-ribbon interface.

About the Office PowerPoint’s competitor Impress, there’s no problems opening a presentation created in Power Point 2007; and slide transitions applied in PowerPoint also carried over in Impress. The slideshow was editable in Impress as well. It seems that OpenOffice has added more animations options as slide transitions.

It’s great that OpenOffice is compatible with MS Office, but Microsoft Office file formats are not native to it. Everyone thinks that OpenOffice has to be an exact MS Office clone. That’s not the case, and OpenOffice has a lot of features that Microsoft Office doesn’t, like the way it integrates with Mysql to perform advanced variable stream data features for printing.

Whether corporates want to direct clients towards OpenOffice as a software solution depends on a variety of factors: budget, client’s dependence on complex spreadsheet processes and macros and the interoperability of OpenOffice with UC platforms and email and messaging systems. Certainly, OpenOffice could be a good choice, and it’s always good for further development by yourself, not just under the Microsoft’s construction.

William Peterson
Presentation Veteran