Rix Bits

Spike Lee is the acclaimed director of such films as Do The Right Thing, Malcolm X, and Inside Man. To create these classics, I’m sure Spike used many different kinds of film editing technologies throughout the years. That being said, I’d still bet that PowerPoint is not one of the tools he ever thought about using.

But even though PowerPoint won’t necessarily give you the same cinematic skills to qualify your video as a Spike Lee Joint, we’ll see in Part 2 of our series that it does have the ability to do some pretty interesting things with videos that you might want to add to your presentation.

In the past, most people’s experience with Microsoft Office involved using it at their place of employment, because the price tag on the full suite of software was a bit hefty for personal home use. But the times, they are a-changing. : ) Microsoft has a handful of new options to help make Office available to home users. One of these is SkyDrive. That’s right, with your FREE SkyDrive account (which you get automatically when you sign up for a FREE Hotmail or Live email account), you’re now able to create, edit, view, and store Office documents in the browser for FREE (using what’s called Office Web Apps), including PowerPoint:

I’m sure you’ve heard of PowerPoint. It’s been around for decades, and it’s the de facto tool for creating a presentation. Whenever you sit in a meeting and someone stands up to give a prepared speech, you probably assume they’re going to use a PowerPoint presentation, and if they don’t you probably look at them funny. We’ve grown accustomed to learning things from others by watching a projector screen full of words fade in and out, and many times we’re even patient enough to allow the speaker to once again read the slides to us as if we’re not already Hooked On Phonics.

But there are a few things about the PowerPoint of today that you might not know about. Over the next few posts, I’ll talk about 5 PowerPoint factoids that may shock and amaze you. Specifically:

1. It’s free!
2. It’s a Spike Lee joint!
3. It likes it when you watch.
4. It’s the Wizard of Oz.
5. It’s mocking you.

Stay tuned for the upcoming posts where we’ll explore each of these topics! See ya soon!

Last month I represented Improving Enterprises (a Microsoft partner) as a speaker at the Microsoft Visual Studio Launch event in Columbus, OH. I spoke on the topic of what is commonly called DevOps. It could be described in one sense as the need within software development to maintain an effective relationship between the software-building phase of a project, and the push-to-production phase.

Clearly I’m a tablet PC fan. I appreciate the power of a PC in a tablet form.  I also appreciate the power of digital ink and true handwriting on my tablet. So I’m not easily impressed by all the Johnny-come-lately consumer tablets that are popular these days.

Right now I’m waiting to see how good the upcoming Surface RT Pro will be. Unlike the current Surface RT, it will contain a full version of Windows 8 Pro, as well as the inclusion of a pen for digital handwriting. In particular, I’m wondering if it’s worth upgrading from my HP Slate 500.

But I’m also wondering if anything will match the smooth performance of my Windows XP (yes, XP) Toshiba hybrid tablet from 2005. I still pull that out every now and then – not when I want to be mobile (it’s big & heavy) but when I want a large screen and good writing experience at my desk. The pen on that thing is flawless. If it wasn’t for it being so bulky, I’d still prefer the WinXP tablet over an iPad to this day.

I’ll let you know if the Windows Surface RT Pro seems powerful enough to become my new tablet. Let’s wait and see.

Just when you thought all the great local conferences were done for this year, suddenly you realize that the Dog Food Conference is coming up on November 8-9, 2012 at the Columbus Microsoft Office.  Dogfooding is all about using the very tools that you produce, and this year Microsoft will show once again how they make use of many of the products that they sale to us. Whether it be Windows 8, SharePoint (my favorite) or the Cloud, the Dog Food Conference this year will showcase many of them with over 40 topics presented over 2 days by community IT professionals.

Registration will open soon, but until then here are some useful links you’ll want to use:

• Topic Submission Link – use the Suggestions button to submit a topic suggestion
• Call for Speakers – use the Submit process to submit a talk for this year’s conference
• The main website will be updated soon.

Based on previous articles in this series, it’s clear to me now that Hollywood has all the answers we need to guide our professional lives. : ) From consulting skills to self-promotion tips, movies provide more wisdom about our day-to-day lives than a box of chocolates. And for guidance on career planning, we don’t have to look any further than the digital drama known as The Matrix. Here are a few rules we can learn from the saga of these hackers-turned-heroes. But remember, as we all know, some of these rules can be bent… others can be broken.