About Mike Fried's Blog
I have been a Developer in the Office team since September of 2001. I joined Microsoft straight out of College (graduating from Brown University in 2001 with an Sc. B in Computer Science). I have worked on features large and small across PowerPoint and OfficeArt. For the Office 2007 release, my major feature work included the new Presenter View, the Selection and Visibility Pane in Excel and PowerPoint, the PowerPoint Table Styles gallery, and the Outline and Notes Panes. I also played various supporting roles in the OfficeArt and PowerPoint platforms in areas related to these features. The Microsoft Office system is an amazingly complicated collection of software and it takes a dedicated team of over 1000 brilliant and passionate software engineers 3 whole years of solid 40+ hour work weeks together with program management, designers, testers, localizers, and many other highly skilled people just to go from one version to the next. It's not a faultless product, but I am very proud of the work that our team has produced, and our whole team is committed to making it better.
The subject matter on this blog is mostly technical in nature and intended mainly for "power users" as well as third party Office System developers, but occasionally you may also find topics of interest to beginning and intermediate level users. All posts are provided "AS IS" with no warranties and confer no rights. In addition, the views expressed on this blog are mine and do not necessarily reflect the views of Microsoft, my employer. In an effort to prevent spam, I generally keep comment periods down to 7 days from the posting date, and will occasionally find it necessary to delete comments.
From time to time, I will write "Future Topics" posts. These are your opportunities to suggest where you want me to go with this blog.
PowerPoint support:
It is not a goal of this blog to answer support questions about PowerPoint. There are far better places to go for this. If you have a question about PowerPoint that isn't answered in the PowerPoint FAQ provided by the PowerPoint MVPs then the odds are you will find an answer if you search the PowerPoint Newsgroup. Microsoft of course has a great number of support resources online and offline.
