At a recent show, the keynote presenter was Guy Kawasaki, who remains a fantastic speaker. I did some refinement of his presentation slides, made sure the multimedia worked in PowerPoint, enjoyed his talk, and received a very nice thank you for the effort.
– Troy @ TLC
I count being awarded as a Microsoft MVP for PowerPoint since 2004 as one of the “career” recognitions I am very proud of. The PowerPoint MVPs are fantastic, good friends and people you can trust to provide real answers to presentation questions.
Today, Microsoft launched a new version of MVP Award public website at https://mvp.microsoft.com. And this year is the 20 year anniversary of the program (pretty big accomplishment considering most software companies have not been around for 20 years yet).
Not a lot for you to see, but it is a good resource if you want to see who the MVPs for any Microsoft application are, and something I am humbled to be listed at.
– Troy @ TLC
While at Microsoft a few weeks ago, I was able to sit in on the production of an episode of “The Office 15-Minute Webinar.”
Dave Ludwig, Chris Downs, Doug Thomas, Troy Chollar, Bruce Bracken
Doug Thomas (3rd from left) is the ring leader for the series and does a great job. I have been around a lot of video production, live events, podcast and webinar production and Doug has definitely assembled a full team and has all aspects covered. In addition to his computer, a 2nd computer viewing the webcast as any viewer does is giving audience view feedback, a professional microphone, video camera (actually the DSLR camera shooting HD through a real lens), professional audio recording system, backup video camera and crew to monitor audio, video and feed web search information are a part of every production. Doug’s previous video series was “Office Casual” and part of the theme carries over to “The Office 15-Minute Webinar” in that there is a lot of pre-planning, scenarios to handle live situations and manpower in each produciton, but he works very hard to make the production feel casual and friendly (all good things!).
– Microsoft’s Office.com division does offer a lot of good resources. This team is in the CPub (Content Publishing) area and TLC Creative Services contributed to another area last year with a series of PowerPoint video templates.
– The webinar home site is here. It airs live every Tuesday at 9:15am PT and recorded episodes are available.
– And the webinar I watched be produced was the MVP special here.
It was a fun day and great to meet the crew of “The Office 15-Minute Webinar.”
– Troy @ TLC
2013 has been a blur so far being at 4 showsites and some personal holidays spread across multiple states (Florida, California, Detroit, Florida) and countries (US, Czech Republic, Germany, Austria). Here is my work area backstage at one of the events (still smiling).
– Troy @ TLC
In day 3 of the Summit and day 2 of sessions with the PowerPoint program and dev team. But as you can see, I have nothing to report (except that a rare cloud failure occurred in Seattle yesterday and it was wonderful and sunny outside).
– Troy @ TLC
I am in Redmond (Seattle) Washington this week at the MVP Summit. Two highlights of the week are meeting with the PowerPoint Dev team and being a part of feedback sessions and spending time with the PowerPoint MVPs!
(Glenna, Dave, Echo, Ric, Sandy, Troy, Steve, Shyam, Juno)
– Troy @ TLC
The recent show in Prague at the Hilton went great. Here is my view of things (note the super wide screen that is a permanent install along with a Pandora’s box system to create multiple PIPs, add background graphics, and more – very nice!)
International meetings have unique needs. Along with all power needing to be adapted from U.S. connectors, there is always need for live translation. For this meeting, translation was in 8 languages (English being one of them).
– Troy @ TLC
There are some perks to being the onsite graphics expert, such as travel. This past week, I have been enjoying the city of Prague in the Czech Republic – beautiful and friendly!
With international travel, I try to limit the amount of tech equipment I bring. In this case, I “only” brought 4 of the 8 needed computers. TLC Creative Services has a fleet of “Show Computers” that are optimized for presentation design and running slide shows. It is always good to work with familiar computers that have all the software, add-ins and settings expected to avoid issues.
For example, here is an image of PowerPoint running on my local (country) rental computers – yes, that is PowerPoint in Czech! Good thing I know the UI and commands by memory!
– Troy @ TLC
Developed in PPT 2010 and can be downloaded here.
I hope you are looking forward to a great year!
– Troy @ TLC
Final day of the year – and it has been a great year! For us here at TLC Creative Services, it has had an overload of projects, lots of new (and repeat) clients, a full year in the new (and larger) office and lots of travel!
Personal life has also been good – lots of family adventures and wonderful Christmas decorations to end the year.
See you in 2013!
– Troy @ TLC