Office Hours Blog

Cloud computing for the Office user

Office Hours Bloggers — Fri, 22 May 2009 05:34:46 GMT

(Toney Sisk is a writer for Microsoft Office, and his focus is on Project and Project Server.) No, computing in the clouds doesn't mean your computer (or you) can suddenly float. But you might ask yourself, Why would anyone want to leave the security...(read more)

Zen in the art of data management

Office Hours Bloggers — Fri, 15 May 2009 17:28:27 GMT

(Radhika Shankar was an international journalist before she boarded the technical and marketing content writing train about 10 years ago. She has enjoyed her writing journey that took her to creating advertising campaigns, documenting the nuts and bolts...(read more)

Take charge of your health – Office templates can help

Office Hours Bloggers — Thu, 07 May 2009 00:32:54 GMT

(Darla Crass is a technical writer for the Microsoft Office Online Web site. She started her career at Microsoft in Product Support answering questions about Windows 3.0. When she’s not at work, Darla enjoys remodeling her house and taking her two dogs...(read more)

How wikis help us wrangle team processes

Office Hours Bloggers — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 02:14:36 GMT

(Toni Saddler-French has been swimming in the waters of content creation for years and years, starting with Microsoft Word 1.1. She has worked with various Microsoft Office products, Internet Explorer, and server products and technologies. In this column...(read more)

Blurring old border lines

Office Hours Bloggers — Thu, 16 Apr 2009 18:05:18 GMT

When you're overwhelmed by e-mail

Office Hours Bloggers — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 18:24:54 GMT

March Madness…Office style

Office Hours Bloggers — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 19:24:22 GMT

(This column was written with Kevin McDowell, who besides being a college basketball fan, is a Microsoft jack-of-all-trades, having worked in product support, training, user assistance, internal tools development and currently testing for Office Online...(read more)

More PowerPoint experts—How fifth graders presented the Bard

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 17:28:51 GMT

(Shellie Tucker writes training courses and videos about PowerPoint and other Office programs. She also spouts off on this blog about both bad and good PowerPoint slides.) Maggie, Aeron, and Hannah are fifth graders who had the challenge of presenting...(read more)

Creating a simple custom workflow to send confirmation email

Office Hours Bloggers — Fri, 13 Mar 2009 19:02:46 GMT

( Loreen La Penna is site manager of an internal Microsoft Office SharePoint 2007 site and a technical trainer who, at the start of her Microsoft career, fielded Windows 3.0 and Excel 4.0 support calls. Now, when she’s not nagging people to update their...(read more)

Bridled Creativity

Office Hours Bloggers — Thu, 05 Mar 2009 22:03:39 GMT

( Holly Thomas is a technical editor by occupational hazard who has segued into writing for this blog and for Inside Office Online. At work and at home she tends to lunge for bright shiny ideas. Learn more about her art and writing at www.mindzayestudio...(read more)

What every Business Major should know about presentations

Office Hours Bloggers — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 00:54:14 GMT

Eric Schmidt is a recent addition to the Microsoft PowerPoint User Assistance writing team. He is amazed that he now gets paid to play with PowerPoint slides. Follow him on Twitter (Schmidt_Eric)! As mentioned previously , students almost effortlessly...(read more)

Office Ninja: Create an instant table (Excel)

Office Hours Bloggers — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 19:57:00 GMT

The Office Ninja returns! Many readers enjoyed the Top 10 most useful secret ninja moves article, so Office Ninja continues the tradition of hidden shortcuts and time-saving tips here. You use Excel all the time for sorting lists. You already know...(read more)

What do kids know about PowerPoint that we don’t?

Office Hours Bloggers — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 22:14:00 GMT

Kristin Beck is a Writer/Editor at Office Online. She has come to regard PowerPoint as an artistic medium. Eric Schmidt is a recent addition to the Microsoft PowerPoint User Assistance writing team. He is amazed that he now gets paid to play with...(read more)

Teach Grade School Students how to Use PowerPoint 2007

Office Hours Bloggers — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 21:51:00 GMT

Besides writing and publishing technical content about PowerPoint to Microsoft Office Online, in my spare time, Joy Miller is the mother of twin, ten year-old boys. My boys are in an accelerated 4th, 5th, and 6th grade classroom. The proud parent that...(read more)

It isn't just for manuals anymore

Office Hours Bloggers — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:26:00 GMT

Ed McKillop has been writing and editing technical and marketing content for over ten years. He has written catchy phrases and many manuals (some boring, some not so boring) for aircraft, servers, hardware, software, cell phones, and a machine that tested water and air for anthrax, back when no one knew what anthrax was. He lives quietly in Seattle, with his small dog Toby, and enjoys writing emails to his friends.

With any relationship you have, how you communicate is paramount. To make it work, you actively listen, ask good questions, and from that exchange you learn and grow. Last June, I started a new job, a new relationship, with Microsoft Office Online because this group puts significant work into listening to users of Word, Outlook, Excel, and the other Office products. What I especially appreciated was the focus on having that conversation in exciting ways: blogs such as this one, also videos, work scenarios, interviews; the list goes on.

As part of my job, I read through thousands of customer comments, perhaps one from you. Some customers are frustrated (where is the Office button…), many get the information they’re seeking, and there are moments when I laugh out loud — very creative and colorful language. Though I can’t share exactly what was said, the best comments go up on my whiteboard: I respect those willing and able to express themselves; I grew up where people shout out of car and living-room windows. The lesson I learned from that: it’s the message that matters.

For ten years I’ve been writing about technology and I can tell you that a great deal of that was incredibly boring. Don’t get me wrong, it was useful, clear and accurate, but not very interesting to the average person and not at all sexy. It was static. Lucky for me, times have changed. Much as Microsoft has evolved to become the company that listens to its customers, content has become a living, dynamic experience. It isn’t 200-page manuals any more. With e-mail, blogs, text and other technologies, we’re all real-time writers and that’s very powerful. Content is a conversation. We can know what’s happening with our loved ones right now, send a message across continents, mountains, and oceans in seconds; and an organization can hear and see what its customers think and feel. At Office Online we distill those thoughts and feelings and from that valued resource we create stories:

Crabby Office Lady: She tells it like it is, Office-program mysteries, and you can tell her what you think. Go ahead, she can take it.

Office Hours: Share in the joys and sorrows of our life with technology.

Top Hits of Office Online: Our greatest hits section – find out what zillions of Office Online customers downloaded in 2008.

At the end of each piece of content we produce, be it an article, Crabby, or Office Hours, you have the opportunity to express yourself. You’ll see the question, Was this information helpful? You can click Yes, No, or I don’t know. Tell us what you’re thinking and we will work to put those words into action.

Sweets for the suite

Office Hours Bloggers — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 20:24:00 GMT

(Richard Bready’s last office hours at Microsoft will be on February 27. This column was written so that his colleagues know where to look for candy when he’s gone. )

Here at Office Online, we do a lot of writing. Writing is brain work. A busy brain burns through 1.5 calories a minute. (Compare that to walking: about 4 calories per minute.) Add caffeine, and the rate rises. Apply a publishing deadline to see some real sweat.

Brain fuel is blood sugar. A healthy diet provides a steady level of blood sugar, but a brain running hard wants regular supplements, the way a marathon runner wants those little cups of water. So we eat a lot of candy. It’s effective, it’s convenient, it’s a reward.

Our mission, of course, and the goal of our working life, is to improve the quality of your life. We show you how you can get more done faster. We bring you tips and tricks, the secret handshakes of software. Documents, spreadsheets, presentations—we set up templates so you don’t have to start from scratch.

In keeping with that mission, here is a list of some quality candy brands that we eat often. Obviously we don’t recommend these over any other candy. No under-the-(candy) counter gifts have been made to get any names mentioned here. And if your brain doesn’t buzz like a hummingbird, you should probably stick with whole grains and aerobics.

What we eat

Boston Fruit Slices http://www.bostonfruitslice.com/home.html
Strongly flavored, chewy, cholesterol-free, and in bright colors—true eye candy
Goetze’s Caramel Creams http://www.goetzecandy.com/
I grew up with these. Forty years later, the Web led me back to them. A high-grade treat for “The Average Kid” in everyone.
Murdick’s Fudge http://murdicks.com/
Real fudge. Butter-based, marble-cooled, hand-groomed, thick-sliced.
See it done: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PyElGTFqM4E Or visit the site to hear the Murdick fudge song.
Alice’s Stick Cookies http://www.alicesstickcookies.com,
Ok; I know. But if a cookie were candy . . . These are like fudge that has fallen in love with flour. Or maybe biscotti after achieving enlightenment. My father eats these for breakfast; he’ll be 90 this year. Draw your own conclusions.
Theo chocolate http://www.theochocolate.com
The “only Organic, Fair Trade, Bean-to-Bar factory in the United States”—chocolate that you can feel virtuous about. And right here in our own Puget Sound backyard.

What are your favorites?

Office Hours is a blog now. That means you can point out the many, many fine candies and other sweet treats not mentioned here. You can exchange your childhood candy memories (if you’re reading this, you may be interested in Steve Almond’s book, Candyfreak, and you may want to mention other books too). So start writing, get that brain in overdrive, enjoy some candy.

“...there was a moment just before you began to eat it which was better than when you were, but he didn’t know what it was called.” (A.A. Milne)

Jenni French: Find trends faster with Excel 2007

Office Hours Bloggers — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 09:33:00 GMT

Jenni French is a Microsoft veteran who has been working at the company since the turn of the century. She’s filled roles in site management, business development, product planning, and market research. She currently crunches a lot of numbers as a Product Manager on the Office Live team.

I crunch a lot of numbers in my job at Microsoft. If you crunch a lot of numbers too, you probably know that squinting at spreadsheets all day can make you a little crazy. Lucky for us, a few features in Excel 2007 make it easier to spot trends, find meaning, and tell a story with numbers.

My new favorite Excel feature is Conditional Formatting. Conditional formatting lets me add colors, graphics, and icons to the numbers based on the value of each cell, or in relation to the cells around them. I use Conditional Formatting in just about every spreadsheet I work on.

Here’s how I use Conditional Formatting to answer the questions I ask when I look at my data.

#1 Is that number growing or shrinking? Icon Set arrows point the way

I like to look for trends in the numbers I monitor by drawing an arrow to the side that tells me if the number is going up, going down, or staying about the same since the last time I checked in on it.

To use Icon Set arrows for trends:

1. In the cells where you want to show the arrows, set up an equation to calculate the difference between the two numbers that you’re showing trend for.

2. On the Conditional Formatting menu, point to Icon Sets, and then select the arrows.

3. Do some final clean-up to make only the arrows show. Select the cells with the arrows, set the font color to white to match the background, and re-size the column to be just wide enough for the arrows.

#2 What’s not ok? Find problem spots with Color Scales

Sometimes I need to know if a number has jumped dangerously out of range, or is getting close to it. Color Scales let me instantly see which numbers are running hot. They also help me figure out how healthy the whole column is, based on rules that I can change based on the limits of what I think is OK.

In this table, the red cells tell me that Lima beans & pinto beans are getting out of hand. And I should probably keep an eye on those navy beans and split peas, too!

To use Color Scales to find problem spots

1. Select the cells where you want to apply color scales

2. On the Conditional Formatting menu, point to Color Scales, and select a scale

3. Click on More Rules to enter your own values for the color-coding cut off points.

#3 How are those numbers related? Spot relationships with data bars

Data bars are like adding an instant, tiny bar chart behind your numbers. I’ll turn on data bars for a whole column of numbers to show which is the biggest, which is the smallest, and how everything in between measures up. Save yourself a ton of steps by skipping the fancy charts, just add data bars to your tables instead.

To use Data Bars to see how numbers measure up

1. Select the cells where you want to apply data bars

2. On the Conditional Formatting menu, point to Color Scales, and select a color for the data bars

The big picture

You can start to use Excel to do some storytelling when you turn on combinations of Conditional Formatting together. On one spreadsheet I update often, I use several columns with color scales side-by-side, creating a virtual heat map that alerts me to a problem when lots of metrics turn red together. And on one of my favorite spreadsheet, I use a combination of all three conditional formatting styles, to give me an at-a-glance view of what’s happening in my data.

Leslie Cole: Podcasts: The end of an era?

Office Hours Bloggers — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 01:53:00 GMT

Leslie Cole is a technical writer and site manager for the newly minted Office Podcasts directory. When she’s not chewing her nails on the Microsoft Redmond campus, Leslie can be found in West Seattle herding three children, a dog, a cat, two chickens, and two parakeets.

True story: A year ago, I didn’t know what a podcast was. I was embarrassingly behind the curve given that I write about technology and that podcasts and podcasting have been around since 2004. A few folks at the New Media Expo I attended in August even lamented the passing of the golden podcast era.

If you still don’t know what a podcast or an RSS subscription is all about, and I know you’re not alone, you’ll agree that podcasting has far from reached its full audience potential. Maybe it’s time for you to take advantage of this fantastic way to view audio and video about almost any subject, on demand. What could be more convenient? And, you don’t need an iPod or any other mobile device to listen to or view podcasts.

Podcasts can be identified like this:

The subscription or RSS feed contains a list of audio and/or video episodes for the podcast series you want to listen to or watch. You don’t have to do a thing except click Subscribe on the RSS feed page and, if you have Outlook, collect new episodes automatically to view any time you want. No Outlook? Install feed aggregator software for free off the web. Go ahead, subscribe to The Best of Office OFFline right now (I know you’ll love it); I dare you. But, if you’re still unsure, listen to this 2-minute audio podcast about RSS by the Crabby Office Lady herself.

Are you convinced yet that podcasts sound easy enough? Then you’re ready to graduate to podcast directories 101. Directories all over the Web feature podcast series about everything from basketball to vegetarianism.

You can turn on our own Office channel to watch Office Podcasts: a podcast directory about everything from Office products to office politics. Start to browsing the podcast directory by checking out the Featured podcasts tab.

Did you notice Presentations Roundtable? Richard Bretschneider produces and hosts this fine audio podcast about the art of creating presentations.

First, click the episode title to go to Richard’s show notes page. Sometimes we’ve featured the latest episode, but often the featured episode is something that caught our eye and that we thought might catch yours, too.

The buttons below the featured podcast give you options related to subscriptions and mobile devices. By clicking the video or earphones icons on the left you can download the featured audio or video episode file to play directly on your computer.

Zune and iPod icons allow you to subscribe to a series through Zune marketplace and iTunes, and then to download the series episodes to view on your Zune or iPod-compatible mobile devices. The RSS icon on the right is a convenient way to subscribe to the series so that you get updated episodes as soon as they are available.

Don’t forget to check out the Products and Titles tabs for a comprehensive catalog of all of the podcast episodes on Office Podcasts. The Community tab features not only podcasts hosted by folks like you but also links to blogs, twitter posts, additional episodes, and other information.

Soon you’ll be making your own audio and video podcasts. There are dozens of tutorials out there… don’t let anyone stop you. Send us a link! Maybe we’ll feature your podcast.

Kristin Beck: Why a customer-first perspective is best for Web content

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 19:09:00 GMT

Kristin Beck is the editor of Columns & Outlook Help on Office Online. When not braving the elements in Redmond, she can be found in Seattle, trying to convince her two children to eat less pasta, more vegetables.

It's impossible not to notice the fact that the Web is changing how we function, write, and think; to even talk about it is borderline-passé. Or so I thought. And then I spent two days listening to speaker Gerry McGovern discuss Web content and I realized we're just at the start of the conversation.

How do you define good Web content? Is it as subjective a proposition as what makes a painting great, or how much cleaning is necessary to render your house "clean enough"?

I spend a lot of time thinking about what constitutes good content; as an editor, I'm paid to do that. In my daily research, I'm seeing a paradigm shift in what is branded "good" content, and it has everything to do with connection.

As evidence that Office Online content publishing managers are taking this paradigm shift seriously, many of them are recommending Gerry McGovern's course, "Creating Customer-Centric Web Sites," to their teams. I recently attended this two-day workshop, which effectively gave me a Ph.D. in customer-friendly Web content.

What I learned

The push to make all content look as though it came from one (very important) person — Bill Gates, maybe — is what used to drive marketing campaigns and make companies rich. The problem is, that created enormous disconnect between the customer and the company.

Our customers just aren't into that anymore. They do not want to be condescended to; they're an incredibly sophisticated, increasingly impatient and skeptical audience. They expect to be written to (and understood) by their content providers.

Remember Creepshow's Upson Pratt, the powerful techie (with a generous case of OCD) from the vignette, "They're creeping up on you" (1982)? Although Pratt claims to have a "germ-proof" apartment, cockroaches invade his sterile environment, undermining his power, authority, and sanity. Pratt can't contain the bugs; they just keep coming in.

It could be said that the power of the community is not unlike the bugs. Their strength is in their tenacity, and they're messy, spilling, gooping, and generally grossing-out his pristine digs. Granted, he's crazy and sadistic, and comparing customers to cockroaches doesn't exactly get my point across. But the image of Pratt — a rich and powerful white guy living alone in a high-tech apartment, getting his butt kicked by bugs — works as an illustration of the shift from the omniscient technical expert to the collective domination of the masses.

What customers want: the short list

Short lists
The ability to search for information easily
To offer feedback on what they like and don't like
Scannable articles, with bullet-points and images (nothing gratuitous though… only if it serves the content)
Humor (they don't want to have to take you, or themselves, all that seriously)
Authenticity (phoniness on the Web is as obvious and transparent as that flash content that, come to think of it, seems to have died down…)

From Gerry's presentation, I discovered that a great example of how Office Online has evolved to reflect this model is the Crabby Office Lady column (for which I am the lucky editor). Until Annik Stahl started offering Help content all dressed up in a fuchsia polyester track suit, all was as it was supposed to be: all-knowing, personality-neutral. Crabby's intuitive entrance onto the Help scene signaled a grand departure for Office in tone and style, and look what happened. From 2002 to today, the column has been translated into at least four other languages and has close to 300K readers each month.

Handing the keys to the community

If you work on Web content and are interested in people and their opinions — and are comfortable with giving up some control — you'll be okay during this transitional time. It's a messy, subjective process. Even if you need to up your meds to deal with the needs of the community, then you must, because, at Pratt says, "Once they get a foothold in the building, you never get rid of them!"

Handing the keys to the community.

Meet more Office Hours writers

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 22:34:00 GMT

Judy Safran-Aasen & John D. Berry: Text wrangling in Office 2007 Two of Microsoft's top typography experts offer examples that will help you make your text as readable as it can be. Frederique Klitgaard: Good worksheet design Good worksheet design...(read more)

Holly Thomas: Web life for grownups

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 07:06:00 GMT

As an editor for the Office group, Holly Thomas focuses on OneNote, Visio, and editorial (r)evolution. Her idea for this column came from a mind-bending conference on Enterprise 2.0 (how BIG BUSINESS uses social media). During her off hours she's a visual artist and writer intrigued (inspired? perplexed? disturbed?) by what's unfolding in the world. Beaches of the Puget Sound island that she calls home are her antidote for information overload. Visit her new blog on MSDN and her somewhat weedy profiles on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Next time you're in a meeting listening to a manager who looks younger than your cat detail your role in your company's Social Media Future (aka Web 2.0), consider this: Never before has the workforce spanned such a crazy range of technological backgrounds. However you draw the lines, those of us who generate paychecks break into distinctly different groups depending on when we grew up:

Before computers Mimeographed homework assignments. Account ledgers. Manual typewriters. Steno pools. Back when "cc" meant actual carbon copies and paper reigned.
Before PCs Humming mainframe systems the size of Cadillacs, rack after rack of data stored on spools of tape, punch cards by the fistful, zigzag paper printouts.
Before the internet Snail mail was the only kind, newspapers thrived, and hard-bound encyclopedias hogged library shelves (until Encarta came along — remember Encarta?)
Before social media Before MySpace and Facebook, Twitter, Digg, RSS feeds, blogs, and wikis. Friends were almost always people you actually, like, knew.
Now The first generation for whom text messaging is almost as natural as speaking, and to whom online privacy matters less than constant presence in a plugged-in world.

And guess what? That last group is the only one that’s growing.

Swimmers and fish

Those of us in the "Before" groups may be jumping into the Social Media environment as fast as we can. But the world of tweeting, texting, friending, digging, and blogging is not our native element.

We're like swimmers. Not nearly of Olympic champion Michael Phelps’ caliber, but capable of learning to cover the distance we need to, charmed by certain entertainments along the way (lunchtime YouTube, anyone?) But there are swimmers, there are excellent swimmers, and then there are fish. Vast numbers of folks now coming of age — the generation that John Palfrey calls "digital natives" in Born Digital — are already so comfortable in the waters of social media that they might as well sprout gills.

Demographic distinctions are more than handy categories. Web 2.0 — the first great wave of social media — is fundamentally retooling how we work, play, connect, and, perhaps quite literally, think. Behavioral scientists and worried educators are scrutinizing our young colleagues-to-be for signs of lopsided intellectual development, social problems, attention shortfalls, etc.. But these same young people also have a facility with virtual communication in multiple media that borders on creative genius.

As for the rest of us? We're looking for common ground.

What we have in common

At work, the mix of perspectives can spur creativity even as it creates tension. Assuming that we all want to accomplish something when we tackle a given project, we most likely set out to:

Find what we need.
Learn what will be useful.
Share what we figure out.
Influence something for the better.
Enjoy the process (or at least emerge from it with no psychological scars).

But how we actually work varies tremendously. For some of us, Web 2.0 tools have already replaced earlier ways of doing research or keeping in touch — or not.

We may post a question to Twitter instead of researching the topic on or offline — or we may regard Twitter as the ultimate randomizer and steer clear.
We may rely on certain bloggers and news compilers instead of mainstream news sites — or cherish the news sites for the way they take the pulse of the world.
We may publish our work in a wiki format that others can modify — or boldly trademark and copyright it to say "hands off."
We may actually read the RSS feeds we sign up for — or watch them pile up in our inboxes, overlooked and forlorn.

In an ever-expanding sphere of possibilities, we’re looking for what works. But even something as sturdy as email gets complicated in this new world.

For example, if you're trying to decide how to brainstorm about a great idea, do you launch a discussion about it on your company blog? Email it to your contacts list? Add it to a group "idea" list on your team's SharePoint site? Whiteboard it in the hallway? Compound the work by monitoring all of the above until you curl into a whimpering ball?

Multi-tasked to a fault

Most of us multi-task. Dave Crenshaw, author of The Myth of Multitasking, and John Medina, author of Brain Rules, both cite compelling evidence that switching from task to task slows us down and introduces more errors than we get from continuous focused attention. Many of us consider multi-tasking as much a pathology as a skill, but for good or ill it's what we do. And to folks who've been doing it all their conscious lives, it's hard to imagine any other way of working.

The popcorn stage

Once when I was having a particularly frenzied day, a friend who used to teach neuroscience told me that young lab mice go through what he called a “popcorn stage” — their muscles lose control and they start ricocheting around their cages, bouncing off walls and ceilings like furry popcorn.

Where Web 2.0 is concerned, many of us are in that stage or approaching it.

Five years ago we didn't write blogs or maintain social profiles. "Friend" was a noun reserved for people we’d actually met. Concerns about privacy made us wary of sharing personal information or mixing personal with professional personas in the online world. And if we had Web sites, we didn’t agonize over whether they were optimized for global search engines.

Now we're scrambling to establish and manage our own online identities through profiles, personal blogs, company blogs, project blogs, wikis, SharePoint sites, networking sites, shared calendars, RSS feeds, podcasts… you name it.

For those of us who didn’t grow up this way, all this can feel pretty strange. We are already multi-tasked to the max in our “real” lives. In our “virtual lives” there’s a building pressure to be everywhere at once. Here at Microsoft there's a joke that if you don't have ADHD when you start, you will by the time you leave. Web 2.0 extends that potential fragmentation through the entire "webiverse."

What this means for business

Finding ways to use our online environment to organize and enhance our work instead of bouncing among too many possibilities is a challenge we haven’t yet mastered. But Web 2.0 is remarkably democratic. It gives everyone who uses the Web a way to rapidly experiment, reach out, and listen.

We're so deluged with information and tasks that we’ve no patience for processes that put speedbumps in our way. We shun websites that haven’t thought through what their visitors need. We’re drawn to sites and environments that offer well-thought-out experiences that evolve publicly and connect people with people.

From our different perspectives, we each become expert in what works and what doesn't. And that’s true whether we’re acting as customers, employees, or owners — and whether the websites and communities we rely on are internal and proprietary or public to the world.

A new art form?

Take heart — just because some of us are grandparents doesn’t mean we're not already social-media-savvy or capable of becoming so. Necessity remains the mother of invention. And for those college-age or younger, ease with all things digital doesn’t necessarily mean virtual life is displacing real life.

Instead, each of us may be participating in the birth of a new art form: weaving our online and offline lives together into a presence more expansive and rich — and with a greater possible influence — than any our ancestors imagined.

Toney Sisk: What's all this talk about Web 2.0?

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 06:59:00 GMT

(Toney Sisk is a writer for Microsoft Office, and his focus is on Project and Project Server.)

No, Web 2.0 isn't the latest software download from Microsoft. Nor is it a new "release" of the World Wide Web. With the blossoming of Web sites over the past five years that help you create and share information, a group of people coined the phrase "Web 2.0" to embrace the new and lively ways that we use the Internet.

In some ways, Web 2.0 doesn't describe anything that hasn't been around since the Internet began. After all, the original purpose of the Internet was to help people create, collaborate on, and share information. Web 2.0 takes these basic ideas to a whole new level.

On thing is certain about Web 2.0: It gives a people a sense of creativity and ownership beyond the usual e-mail and yearly holiday greeting cards. Let's take a closer look at what the hubbub is all about.

Social networking These sites allow you to set up personal Web sites that express your interests and activities. A social networking site also helps you meet and interact with people with similar or completely different interests. Facebook, MySpace, and Second Life are popular social networking sites.

Profiles Profiles appear when you turn your head sideways. Also, they are an online representation of your character and personality — a virtual you! Social networking sites typically require that you set up a profile that others can read and add to their list of friends.

Video and photo sharing Sharing your mutli-media creations with the rest of the world is one of the fastest and most engaging aspect of the new Web. Whether it's Flickr for your photos, YouTube for your personal videos, or Microsoft Community Clips for your videos about the your latest discovery about how Office products work, spreading the word (and pics) across the Internet is getting easier and more enjoyable.

Ranking and tagging Not all information you find across the internet is equally interesting or accurate — and there's more information out there every day! One aspect of Web 2.0 is the ability on many sites to rank the value of the site and its contributors. Keeping an eye on site rankings becomes an exercise in sorting through the good, the bad, and the ugly on the Web.

The idea of a "web" implies that you might get tangled up and stuck (and sometimes bitten). To deal with the endless content available on a typical Web 2.0 site, tagging evolved. Photo and video sites, for example, are nearly valueless unless contributors can attach descriptive words to their creations, which site visitors can then use to find the types of photos and videos that interest them. You might come across the phrase "tag cloud" to describe the way many sites present tags as a cluster to navigate around a site's content.

RSS feeds Wouldn't it be nice if the information you wanted came to you instead of you having to go look for it? Web 2.0 can help you with your laziness! With RSS (Really Simple Syndication), you can have Web pages, videos, podcasts, and other interesting tidbits automatically downloaded to your computer or handheld device whenever they become available.

For example, you can have the latest entries from your favorite blog show up on your computer as soon as they are published! Some applications that are widely used (and are probably already on your desktop, like Outlook 2007) even have RSS feed reading software built in, ready for you to start plunking in your favorite feeds.

Forums Forums are sites that host discussions on any subject that is possible to think about. Whether it's kite flying or spelunking, you'll find contributors to answer questions and shout out opinions. Forums are gems of the modern Web. You may have to wade through a lot of argument and nonsense across forum boards, but you'll also find the kind of insights into a subject that isn't available in books and magazines (or anywhere else).

Blogs Think of blogs as someone's thoughts or opinions that is updated frequently, usually many times each day, like a personal journal. Reading most blogs is like listening in on someone else's conversation. Others offer up insight commentary on the state of the world, culture, technology, art, or someone's state of mind. Since other people can comment on someone else's blog, lively conversations can bubble up. Hundreds of Web site offer ways to quickly to start a blog. You can even start a blog using Microsoft SharePoint, since more and more corporations are using blogs to communicate with co-workers and other stakeholders.

Wikis Wikis are the ultimate expression of sharing and collaboration in the Web 2.0 world. A wiki is a Web site that contains articles that can be freely edited by visitors to the site, without downloading software. The ability for any visitor to modify any wiki page is one of the characteristics that has had led to Web 2.0 being described as the "read/write" Web. Wikipedia is one of the best known wiki sites. From skydiving to brick laying and everything in between, you'll find an article on Wikipedia on just about anything you care to learn more about. With armies of "Wikipedians" to make sure the content is accurate, and many people have come to see Wikipedia as a place to begin their research.

These days, many sites offer wikis as a way for users to make changes to Web content. You can Create a wiki page using SharePoint.

Podcasts It was once said that on the Internet no one can hear you scream. Now they can. Welcome to podcasts. Think of them as free subscriptions to radio shows or personal videos that are posted to a site on a regular basis. You can either view them on the Web site, or you can download them to your favorite digital media player, like a Zune or iPod.

The Internet is your computer Saving and sharing documents to the Web and even editing them entirely within a browser appears to be the future of our desktop lives. A phrase you'll hear a lot to discribe this trend in computing is "cloud computing". Web applications like Microsoft Windows Live and Microsoft Office Live allow you to do just that: Save and work on documents from any computer that is connected to the World Wide Web--without downloading a bit of software.

The Internet platform isn't just about personal stuff. It's about business, too. The information problems that small businesses and large conglomerates have often differ in scale, not type. Web applications like Microsoft Office Small Business can help small businesses get started handling Web traffic, advertising, and design issues — without downloading anything.

Learn more about Software plus services.

For more advanced applications that a small company might need, such as customer relations software, monthly fees can be charged. "Software plus services" is a phrase often used for this merging of the Internet and desktop computers into a single platform, making software companies much more customer-centric, responsive and productive.

Roxanne Kenison: Loving to learn the 2.0 life

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 09 Sep 2008 06:57:00 GMT

Roxanne Kenison is a technical writer in the Office group and was first aware of Microsoft as a logo on a building next to her local Burgermaster. She laments the lack of time to pursue several hobbies, but manages to get outdoors occasionally with her husband and son, with whom she makes her home in Seattle. You can follow her blog at http://blogs.msdn.com/techwritrr.

Are you a 1.0 person living in a 2.0 world? Here is one information worker's take on what Web 2.0 means for information work, some techniques and tools for adapting, and why you should care.

My Inbox in Outlook is like a giant catcher's mitt. Nearly everything I need to pay attention to, plus a lot of things that I ought to ignore, land there reliably. In bygone days, to keep up to date and to communicate with colleagues, the only thing I needed was my Inbox. I loved my Inbox. Sure, sometimes it got over-full like a gluttonous dinner guest, but I learned how to tweak my rules in Outlook. I adopted habits for getting things done (yes, the David Allen method), and streamlined my techniques for processing the contents of my Inbox. Ultimately, I controlled my Inbox, and it made my life clear and simple.

Those days are gone.

These are the days of 2.0. By 2.0, I mean the social, interactive, connected, communicative, feedback-oriented nature of the Web nowadays. But it goes beyond the Web; it's the 2.0 life.

What's the 2.0 life?

To me, these are the hallmarks of the 2.0 life: it's participatory, it's instantaneous, it's diffuse. It changes how the game is played. If my Inbox is a giant catcher's mitt, then the 2.0 life is a vast cocktail party, without the fancy clothes. The conversations are everywhere, all the time.

If you're like me, you probably wonder where people find the time to follow so many bloggers, subscribe to so many feeds, watch so many videos, and blog about their profession and their latest vacation — complete with photos, which other people tag with metadata. And they're doing all this while they're Twittering, IM-ing, and writing on the walls of their friends. They have lots of friends.

It seems to me that these people not only read every page on the Web, they post comments about what they read. Inexplicably, they even have time to read BOOKS (an antiquated technology), and then they post reviews. Then they rate the reviews that others post. Oh, and they're still sending as much e-mail as ever. Some of it even lands in my Inbox.

Is anyone getting any work done?

Doing your job vs. doing your work

In my group, within the Office organization here at Microsoft, we think of our customers as "information workers." My definition of an information worker is someone whose job entails sharing, communicating, processing, or acting upon data, facts, knowledge, and ideas. Chances are, that's you. It certainly is me. It's the Information Age, remember? Today, 'most everyone is an information worker.

A few years ago, my manager had our team read Job Shift, by William Bridges, an author with expertise in careers and change management. Even back in 1995, when Job Shift was written, Bridges posited that jobs as we traditionally think of them are a thing of the past. Increasingly, workers don't merely produce a deliverable; they are expected to contribute to the intellectual capital of their organizations. If you're an information worker, chances are your employer wants you to synthesize ideas, to learn on the job, to be creative, innovative, even entrepreneurial.

With all these expectations, you may be wondering, "When am I supposed to get my work done?"

But that's just the point: all of this is now your real work. Your deliverable, plus the way you synthesize ideas you get from everywhere, your thoughts about your organization and your industry, they way you work with your colleagues, and the way you reach across organizational boundaries to innovate — as an information worker, all of this is now your day job. When you come to realize this, you gain a new perspective on the 2.0 life.

Suddenly, the 2.0 life isn't a fad, an inconvenience, or a lot of hullabaloo. It's necessary.

Retooling for 2.0

The 2.0 life is all about making connections: connecting people with each other, with information, and with goods and services. The technology of 2.0 — the RSS feeds, wikis, instant messaging, blogs, social networking sites — all these things clamor for my attention and burden me with information overload. Yet, these things are also the tools that today's information workers need to do their jobs.

SharePoint is for blogging

I'm in the infancy of my 2.0 life. When I stumble upon a great idea, I still fire off e-mail to my immediate colleagues. Then I remember our team has an Idea Exchange blog, and the next time I have an idea I post it there instead.

I've started using SharePoint's blog feature to publish updates of the projects I'm working on. At first I duplicated efforts, posting to the blog and sending the same content in e-mail. In the e-mail, I encouraged people to subscribe to the blog if they were interested in continuing to receive the updates. I still duplicate the post and the e-mail, but now I send the e-mail version to a much smaller audience.

Outlook to the rescue

Why not dispense entirely with sending the e-mail version? I'm not yet ready to trust that the these updates will be seen by the relevant audience unless I place it in their Inbox. There's still a place for the Inbox, at least in my organization. I certainly still rely on mine. In Outlook, to ensure that I see content that I subscribe to, I resorted to dragging the most important of my RSS Subscription folders up, to make them subfolders of my Inbox.

Now that I'm writing this Office Hours column, I've been perusing past submissions, and noticed that Michael Affronti has some great ideas for using Outlook to track RSS feeds efficiently. I look forward to trying these. He contributed two pieces: Office Hours: Outlook and RSS: A match made in syndication and Office Hours: Advanced RSS usage: Buckle your seatbelts.

See you in the Townsquare

I like to tell my colleagues that I just don't get Facebook. It feels too public, too invasive — and too frivolous. And yet, within the company we have a SharePoint application called Townsquare, which brings some Facebook-like features to the enterprise. I was surprised to find that in the context of the workplace, things that turned me off about Facebook feel legitimate on Townsquare.

For example, I can see at a glance that a colleague has updated a document that's related to a project we're both working on. Later that afternoon, she sends me an instant-message with a question about the project. The instant message doesn't feel like an intrusion. On the contrary, I half expect it, having seen her activity on Townsquare.

Similarly, I have a Twitter account that I've never found a reason to use. Yet on Townsquare I enjoy dashing off my status update and reading the status of colleagues, whether or not the status information is work-related. As I write this, one co-worker, "needs more coffee," another is "out of the office," and provides information about who to contact in his absence. According to my status, I am "going to check in my Office Hours column today, by gum."

If you want to read more about Townsquare, check out this EWeek article.

Connecting with Communicator

Office Communicator is another tool that's bringing me into the 2.0 life. For one thing, it's synchronized with Exchange and with Townsquare, so if I update my Twitter-like status message, the same message appears in both Communicator and Townsquare. If I have a meeting on my calendar in Outlook, Communicator is smart enough to display my online status as "In a meeting," and anyone who has me in their contact list can see this. In fact, everyone's presence information is continuously up to date. In Outlook, the colored dots next to people's names on the To and From lines tell me who is available, who is offline, who is away, and so on. If I hover my mouse over their name, I can also read their Twitter-like status message.

I used to hate instant messaging because I like the asynchronous quality of e-mail, and it felt downright rude to receive an instant message. "Drop everything and answer me, right now!" It's odd that the telephone is at least this intrusive, but it didn't bother me, probably because I'm so accustomed to it. Recently I discovered that I no longer mind receiving instant messages. I even initiate them now. Using Communicator, if I notice that a colleague is available and I have a quick question, I send them an instant message. I find that it's actually less intrusive than the telephone, since your hands never leave the keyboard.

No going back

Change is difficult, especially when it's as fast-paced as the change in my workplace. Still, despite feeling overloaded at times, despite the stress of trying to track too many things at once, I like what the 2.0 life has to offer. As efficient as my Inbox is, I always suspected there was a great big world outside of it, and living in 2.0 means living in that world.

The thing I like best about the 2.0 life is that I'm always learning something. I can't always make a direct connection between what I learn and what I deliver as an information worker, but in the 2.0 life, that's perfectly okay. In the 2.0 life, it's less about what you deliver and more about what you share, and how you contribute. When I look at it that way, I realize that my 2.0 life is tremendously enriching. I'm out of my Inbox for good.

Philip Su: Top 10 most useful secret ninja moves in Office

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 06:56:00 GMT

Philip Su is a principal software engineer at Microsoft. He has also been a developer in Office, MSN, Windows, and Live Search. In his copious free time, Philip co-authored Building Tablet PC Applications, taught classes at the University of Washington, and managed to almost get fired twice. For more random wackiness about Philip, read his blog.

Office is a treasure trove of hidden features that make everyday life easier. Although each version of Office has made improvements in helping users discover the available features, I find that some of my favorite features are still not well-known amongst friends and family.

Here are my top 10 most useful secret ninja moves to increase your productivity and win friends and lovers.

#1: Format painter (Office)

The Format Painter tool replicates the formatting from one part of a document to another. So instead of manually redoing all the formatting yourself, you can use the Format Painter. First, select the text whose formatting you want to replicate. Then, click the Format Painter toolbar button. Finally, select the text you want to imbue with the format. For bonus points, you can double-click the Format Painter button to replicate the formatting to multiple areas of the document!

#2: Paragraph in/out/up/down (Office)

You can easily move a paragraph in four directions by pressing Alt+Shift+[Arrow]. To increase or decrease the indentation level of a paragraph or bullet point, press Alt+Shift+Right and Alt+Shift+Left respectively. To move a paragraph up or down, press Alt+Shift+Up or Alt+Shift+Down. This works especially well in PowerPoint, where it's common to reorder bullet points or change indentation levels.

#3: Increase or decrease font size (Office)

To quickly increase the font size of selected text, press Ctrl+Shift+>. To decrease the size, press Ctrl+Shift+<. I find it easy to remember these keyboard shortcuts because the one with the greater-than symbol increases the font size while the less-than symbol decreases it.

#4: Quick Access Toolbar (Office)

Office 2007 has a Quick Access Toolbar that can be customized to include buttons for your favorite commands. The Quick Access Toolbar is in the top left corner of many Office applications. You customize it by clicking on the drop-arrow on its right.

#5: Fill handle (Excel)

Excel can auto-fill cells in eerily smart ways. Instead of manually typing a sequence in cells, you can simply type the first few values of the sequence and drag the fill handle to auto-fill the rest of the cells. The fill handle is the little black square at the lower right corner of a selected cell's border. Drag it to automatically fill adjacent cells.

If you drag the fill handle with only one cell selected, it will repeat that cell's value into adjacent cells. However, if you drag the fill handle with multiple cells selected, Excel is smart enough to figure out the series. For instance, in the following example, Excel will fill subsequent cells with the increasing series of odd numbers. This even works for other types of series, like dates and percentages.

#6: Moving and copying cells by dragging selection borders (Excel)

Quite possibly the most useful yet completely undiscoverable feature in Excel is the ability to move and copy cells by dragging selection borders.

For instance, to move row four between rows one and two, select row four and drag the selection border while holding down the Shift key in order to insert it in its new position. If you drag the border without holding down the Shift key, the selected cells will instead replace the cells you drop them on. Conversely, if you hold down Ctrl while dragging a selection border, the selected cells are copied to their new location.

#7: Status bar statistics (Excel)

The status bar in Excel shows handy statistics when multiple cells are selected. In Excel 2007, the status bar shows the selected cells' average, count, and sum. This is an easy way to quickly analyze data without authoring formulas.

#8: Clear formatting (Word and PowerPoint)

To remove formatting from selected text, press Ctrl+Spacebar.

#9: Advanced field search (Outlook)

In Outlook, you can quickly search through a mail folder by using the Instant Search box. In addition to searching for keywords, you can do a fielded search by prefixing your search text with a variety of field names.

For instance, the above example searches for all mail from people named "jimmy" sent in May with attachments that have "jpg" in the filename. I most often use this feature for two things: to easily find email from a specific person, and to find specific attachments.

#10: Presenter view (PowerPoint)

PowerPoint has for many years had a great feature called Presenter View, which allows you as the presenter to see a different view of the presentation from your audience. In Presenter View, your monitor shows not only the slides, but also your notes as well as the current elapsed time in the presentation. This makes giving a presentation far easier. To enable Presenter view, go to the Slide Show ribbon and check Use Presenter View. In that same section, you can also change the monitor which the presentation is shown on. One note: the Use Presenter View checkbox can only be checked if you already have a second monitor connected and enabled.

Final words

Impress friends, family, and hot dates with your newly acquired Secret Ninja Skills! But please help me spread the word so that they don't stay secret any longer. After all, everyone should benefit from these great tools and shortcuts.

Shellie Tucker: PowerPoint without bullets

Office Hours Bloggers — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 06:53:00 GMT

As part of the Office Online Training and Demos team, Shellie Tucker has written about PowerPoint, Word, InfoPath, Office SharePoint Server, and other Office programs. She cares about the audience, so please provide feedback!

It was a gamble. And it gave us pause. Could we give a PowerPoint presentation and use NO BULLET POINTS? Could we divorce ourselves from the tried and true — and deadly boring? We decided to try.

You've had the experience many times: sat down in a conference room for a PowerPoint presentation, gotten the cheerful intro from the presenter, felt hopeful as you eyed the big first slide projected on the screen with its cool corporate colors, and then WHAM! Slide 2 hits you like a ton o' bricks. It is packed to the gills with text, using all five levels of bullet points and every micron of space on the slide, in the tiniest possible type — something like this:

If you had hope for the presentation, it evaporates. Once again, you're the victim of bullet-point abuse. The presenter has filled the slide with bullet-pointed text and expects you to read it all, as he or she covers each point. And you know there are probably 20 slides to come that look just like this one. The room feels airless, and you plot your escape.

Unfortunately, this is an all-too-common PowerPoint experience. Even at Microsoft, where PowerPoint is developed, people who use it tend more toward the text dump-a-thon approach than to tapping the program's high visual and entertainment potential. I see why it happens. We're under pressure to deliver a certain amount of information in the slide show, and the most direct method seems to be to fill up the bullet points with it. End of story.

The sad thing is, the result is torture for an audience to sit through. By contrast, we think wistfully of those few presentations in our lives that have been fun to watch, from start to finish — with presenters who really wanted to engage us, and who used the slides to play video or display clever images or conceptual graphics that brought home what they were saying.

It was with the goal to try something like this — a slide show that would delight rather than dismay — that I and my team decided to bust out of the suffocating bullet-point clench.

Our chance

It was an effort I'd been waiting to make. I was sick to death of the standard series of text-filled slides. Also, while it's my job to write about PowerPoint, the bulk of that is in-the-trenches work, focused more on how bits of PowerPoint work than on the actual use of it, i.e.: giving presentations. I wanted to learn something new there.

At the same time, a compelling book came my way, Cliff Atkinson's Beyond Bullet Points: Using Microsoft® PowerPoint® to create presentations that inform, motivate, and inspire (Microsoft Press, 2005). Wow, that was exactly what I wanted to do. Could Atkinson show me the way? (Note: There is now a wonderfully expanded 2008 edition, based on PowerPoint 2007.)

Interest met opportunity when my team was asked to give a presentation to other writers and editors in Office User Assistance. All of us in Office UA contribute to the Office Online web site, but we specialize in different programs and content. My team primarily creates online training courses for the site. Now there was an effort to give more of us in the group at large a chance to try new content. So, the goal of our presentation was to encourage others to write courses and to give them guidelines for doing that.

Part of our mission in writing training courses is to make learning Office an enjoyable thing. It only followed that a training presentation on the subject would have to be enjoyable, too.

Finding the drama

We turned to Beyond Bullet Points as our guide for a new kind of slide show. (Note: What follows is a subjective take on the BBP method and an illustration of how we applied it. I don't represent this book or have any tie to the author. That said, I can't recommend it highly enough.)

Thank the stars for Cliff Atkinson, who conceived the "beyond bullet points" approach (hereafter referred to as BBP). Atkinson helps you realize that hidden in the dry details of the information you're presenting is a story. A drama in which your audience is a key player. That's a central shift of the BBP way: your slides aren't the focus of the show. Your audience is.

Your job, as presenter, is to figure out the drama that's brought all of you together and approach your material in those terms.

What's the need of your audience?
How are you going to address that need?
What can your audience count on having at the end?

You address those critical questions right at the start, laying out a kind of plotline—an instant audience hook.

Getting visual

The other key to making the slide show engaging is that you maximize the slides’ visual potential. Atkinson explains that the slide needs to communicate to people’s “visual channel,” while they’re taking in what the speaker is saying through their “verbal channel.” If the slide merely duplicates what the speaker is saying, it’s a distraction. A powerful image, by contrast, completes the speaker's message.

It doesn’t mean you use no text. Remember: you’ve got your presentation “story” to tell. You do this by turning each slide’s title into a complete sentence, stating the point of the slide. And you illustrate that with an image.

So: kicking off our slide show, our goal was to deliver our plotline up front, bolstered by supporting images. You're meant to do this in the first five slides. Our first five looked something like this:

With the slide text pared down to only a title, the onus is on you, as presenter, to give the additional commentary for each slide. In this way, you keep your relationship to the audience active and dynamic. Now they're not looking to the slide for the details, they're looking to you.

Capturing your notes

You can capture your commentary in the form of speaker notes, in that area in the PowerPoint window that is below the slide (not visible in a slide show). So, bullet points don't go away entirely, but they're reserved for the notes. The great thing is that you can print out all these notes and use the notes pages as your handout. (Notes pages are one of the options you have for printing.) The format is tidy. Here’s an example of how one page from our slide show looked printed with the notes:

PowerPoint also lets you print handouts in Word (in PowerPoint 2007, click the Microsoft Office Button, point to Publish, and click Create Handouts in Microsoft Office Word; in 2003, click the File menu, and point to Send To). This requires some work with formatting, but it’s another possibility. You could opt to delete the slide images in Word and just print a nicely formatted outline for your handout, too.

Making the shift

I was sold at the start to try something different with PowerPoint. So what was the experience actually like, to make the shift to a new kind of slide show, and do so with a team of people?

Not without its bumps and challenges. Looking specifically at the BBP approach, you start by hammering out an outline, and this endeavor was gnarly. You know that there has to be a lot of back and forth among team members to come up with wording and an approach that's agreeable to all.

But one reason the BBP outline was tough was that it had to be really fleshed out before we could start creating slides. I noted, regarding the slide examples above, that each slide title had to be a complete sentence, to keep the storyline clear. Well, those sentences are drawn directly from your original outline (you do the outline in Word, and use the Slides from Outline command in PowerPoint 2007 to import them). That was quite a tall demand. I found that some of the wording, tone, and even the approach I wanted were not precisely clear to me until I was closer to a presenting situation, working with slides, imagining an audience. Also, if one person is wordsmithing the outline, other presenters may not feel that the slide wording fits with their own style.

But the biggest mental hurdle was the shift to images on the slides rather than text. Yes, I confess: losing my bullet points initially made me panic. Once we'd gotten all our slide titles onto slides in PowerPoint, we had a whole lot of blank space (over 70 slides) that we had to fill with images. Going visual felt overwhelming.

Getting in touch with good online resources for free images helped, though. (Beyond Bullet Points gives great tips on finding free ones or ones that you can license for cheap.) And then, thinking about the right image or graphic for the slide became fun. Of course, you don't always need a representative picture. Sometimes another type of shape—animated text boxes or thought bubbles — or graphic was appropriate.

As for my teammates, they took to the visual format like ducks to water.

It's worth it

In the end, I think we'd all agree it was well worth it. Our audience's feedback was overwhelmingly positive. And the effect, for me, of thinking about the audience in a new way is lasting. Having chucked the bullet-point approach, I can't go back. However I get there, in future presentations, the audience comes first.