I stumbled on this presentation posted online.

It is the internal training presentation for Citi Group on email security and communication. The content is interesting. The slides - standard corporate stuff with to many words, limited formatting and dropped in rectangle .jpg's.

View it here.

- Troy @ TLC

Just a few quick photos of my backstage office for a recent show and yes, the real Beach Boys were the entertainment (lots of fun when you know the lyrics to virtually every song!).

- Troy @ TLC

Read about this deal at Techinch which is a great deal - if you are a college/university student or faculty.

To summarize the deal:
- Purchase Office 2007 at super price at Ultimate Steal here. Need a valid .edu (education) email address to purchase
- When Office 2010 is released in June, use Microsoft's free upgrade offer

- Troy @ TLC

At my meeting last week I was fortunate enough to have Guy Kawasaki as the guest and run his presentation.

Really great speaker, super presentation, cool website (alltop.com) and nice enough to pose for a photo.

- Troy @ TLC

A few asked about the event at Microsoft. It is a fantastic privelege to spend a few days on the Microsoft's Redmond campus for the MVP summit. There were over 1,500 Microsoft MVPs attending. There are 34 PowerPoint MVPs globally and 13 of us were able to accept an invitation from Microsoft to meet and talk about the future versions of PowerPoint.

Here is the press release:

1,300 of the world's top leaders from the technical community will spend four days at the Microsoft Corporate headquarters in Redmond, Washington this week for the 2010 Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) Global Summit.

Microsoft’s MVP Award Program is in its 17th year, with MVPs representing 96 countries, speaking 37 different languages and spanning 94 Microsoft technology areas.

The Summit gives Microsoft's product groups an extraordinary opportunity to listen to their MVPs during more than 700 sessions throughout the week.

Summit brings together some of the top leaders within global technical communities,” said Toby Richards, general manager, Community and Online Support for Microsoft. “I always look forward to this week and am extremely excited to engage with technology’s best and brightest and discuss what’s on their minds.”

- Troy @ TLC

Winter season is here, so the corporate meetings head to warmer climates. In the past 30 days I have been in Utah, Colorado, Nevada, Florida, Hawaii and Arizona. To pick a favorite skiing with my girls in Colorado was #1, but working in Maui with the Oakley (ie. sunglasses) group was a lot of fun!

That is Paul Chrisope (show producer and video playback) and Gary Meeker (audio, VOG and music mix-master).

- Troy @ TLC

At CES this weekend Neowin.net shared some statistics it obtained about Office 2010 beta and Office 2007 use (saying data was created from a Dec '09 beta survey and from Office's anonymous reporting).

o 41 billion minutes in Outlook
o 31 billion minutes in Word
o 18 billion minutes in Excel
o 3 billion minutes in PowerPoint
o In October 2009, US online PC users spent more time in PowerPoint than in Halo 2 on the PC

Not sure how to quantify the numbers, but they are interesting and amusing. There are some more listed here.

- Troy @ TLC

Over the weekend Microsoft officially pulled the plug on sales (and downloads) of Office 2003.

The lawsuit against Microsoft about the use of some XML code in Word has ended distribution of it. Bcause Word cannot be distributed and the Office suite has Word - cannot be distributed (only Word is the program in question). Here is a good summary article about the lawsuit.

Like a good movie trailer for a bad movie, the title is more appealing than the full show. Office 2003 is not really gone, just the current version. An alternate version with the questionable code removed will be in circulation, which should be identical to even the most knowledgeable Word users.

- Troy @ TLC

Working from this slide the goal is to give both an identical look/style (file can be downloaded from previous post).

The template has a few options for tables preset that the imported tables to not automatically have turned on. Until these are manually activated the Table Styles Options will produce different visuals for the charts.

As example, for the sample file the 'Header' and 'Banded Rows' is active for all new tables by default. But the inserted PPT 2003 tables do not have these options active.

Select the (PPT 2003) table, activate these options and the 2 tables can easily be updated to look identical for a consistent presentation.

- Troy @ TLC