Powerpoint is my new best friend
I have been spending more time with PowerPoint in the last few days than with my husband. And I've got more walks in the park and nice dinners with my new friend in the week ahead. We are now 9 days from the TAP Kickoff Event!
Right now I'm taking a break from reviewing my slides for my TAP Program Breakout session. The good thing is that I am very comfortable with the information, since it's basically just a run-through of what I've been working on for the last 6 months on my team. The bad thing is getting all the slides in an order that makes sense, making sure I haven't forgotten anything, and hoping that my 48 (!) slides will fit in an hour. Just kidding -- a lot of them are topic headers and I've still got some duplicates so I'm not too worried about it.
I worked pretty hard on my slide deck/presentation for the TAP Buddy training, which I did last Thursday. It was a little freaky to see the room filled up with 30+ of my teammates (all of them guys--welcome to Microsoft!) plus a couple of the managers and realize that I had better make the session useful, if they had to be there at such a critical time in our project. I think it went well - except for my slip-up in forgetting to dial into the conference call before it started, and having to do that a few slides into my talk. People asked questions and made some good program suggestions. I even got a couple of compliments on my slides - so time spent with my new best friend was apparently worth it.
In case you care, I am a special fan of the Slide Design included with PowerPoint called "Network". I've used it in all the presentations I've had to give that didn't have a pre-determined template. It's not very elaborate, but looks professional. And the blue/green color scheme is somehow soothing. (Yes, it's possible my brain has turned to mush over the past few days.)
Next week at work will be super-duper-crazy-busy, with the Dry Run of our presentations the first few days of the week, then a flurry of making sure all the "little things" are in place - machine set-up in Bldg 20, catering, events, software, etc. I have a good feeling about this and am really looking forward to meeting "my" TAP participants in person after all the email we've exchanged. The more I work on this, the more I realize that this job is exactly what I want to be doing. And that's a pretty cool feeling!
Well, back to my new best friend. I think I'll invite him to have a glass of wine with me this evening. [:D]
