Bob's Tech Talk

Are you  in charge of creating your organization’s employee manuals and other support tools? You may want to consider adding Video support to your portfolio. There are so many tools out there that will allow you to accomplish this, it is very hard to make the choice of the right ones to use. Let me make a few suggestions for you to look at.

TechSmith is a company that has been producing software to help educators and support personnel to provide simple, professional looking video for quite a few years. I use several of their products to help me produce my   How To  Videos as well as short videos I use to respond to my clients at the office.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words but what is a video worth? I said I used several of TechSmith’s tools and this first one I am going to talk about is free. The Jing Project is a program that is offered by TechSmith that will integrate back into  their other products. Jing has two components that will help you with your presentations. The first is a static screen capture. In Windows 7 you have that component as part of the operating system but you if you are not running Windows 7 you are missing it. There are many times when I am working with an article or proposal that I need to be able to capture part of screen display like I did with all of the images on this page. It is so much easier to be able to call on Jing to capture a little bit of the screen real-estate that I want to include without having to come back and work with my cropping tools to get it just right.

The second component of Jing is it’s video capture. While this may sound like the same thing, it most assuredly is not. With Jing I can capture all of my screen changes and narrate the subject matter at the same time and produce a quick, up to 5 minute presentation on the fly. The only negative, you have to do it in one take or begin again from scratch.

Camtasia Studio is the paid version of Jing on steroids. This product lets you take the next step  forward and create content with much better focus and give you the ability to tie multiple videos and stills together and to overlap them all with a narrative that you can add after the video collection is complete. The big difference here is that ability to edit your video.  Camtasia Studio will allow you to take video that you capture with Jing, Camtasia Studio or from some other static image or video sources and work with the content to achieve your creative result.

This leads me to the last component of the TechSmith Family that I use called Screen Cast. If you sign up with Screen Cast you will be able to easily store and serve up you video creations to the inhabitants of the Wild and Wooly Web (WWW).

So if you are interested in seeing these programs in action, don’t hesitate making an appointment with me to see them. I will be more than happy to show them off and help you decide if they are the right fit for your business.

I am sitting here are going my emails this evening, and it occurred to me that we have really gotten lazy or I have extremely high expectations of my fellow human beings. When I see comments come across the internet about why companies are upgrading products and making them better, faster and more usable (my definition), I wonder just how lazy and complacent we have become. Don’t you want to progress, learn and become better at what you do? Don’t you want you tools that you use day in and day out help you to make your job easier and more productive? I can’t understand the attitude of people that look at every possible step forward as something to disdain and fight with all their might. All that energy wasted on trying to stop normal progression when just a small amount of effort will get them to the next level. Hey! Don’t become the Neanderthal in your work group. Embrace, learn and become the better person.  Such a simple thing and so hard for some of us to do. Sorry about the Rant. but if it hits home it sure is worth it!

I look at the skill sets that we all need to have in our jobs and wonder when it was in my youth that I learned that I was going to be a student for the rest of my life. This is something that we all need to realize. In all honestly I can’t wait until the day that I retire and can begin the next part of my life. Because, you see, work sometimes gets in the way of the learning. It is funny how this can happen. There can be so much fun, amazement and improvisation with all these tools that so many magnificent minds provide us. When you begin to allow learning to become fun, then you have finally allowed all of life’s amazing wonders to fill your soul. Let it. You will be amazed at the outcome.

I have officially moved Bobs Tech Talk from Microsoft’s site over to SquareSpace. The first benefit that you will see is that the Posts are now indexed and are searchable. So if you are looking for information that you had a hard time finding before, you can enter a key word or phrase and the will bring it right up for you. I will be able to put more information on this site as time goes by as well. This is a full website not just a controlled blog feed and I will be able to put richer content on the site as I move forward. It is still accessible by typing in http://bobstechtalk.com. Let me know what you think of the new site and send me any requests or questions that you have that I can address for you in future postings.

We had a recent request for how to make Word 2007 look like Word 2003…

Though I truly believe that the new interface in Office is so much better than what we had in Office 2003, some people have had a hard time with learning the new versions Office products.

From Steve Bass’s Tips and Tweaks:

Make The Change To Office 2003
If you're stuck with Office 2007, yet yearning for the familiar menu of Office 2003, you now have an option. It's an add-in from Addintools: Classic Menu for Office 2007. It changes the menus for Word, Excel, Access, Outlook, and PowerPoint. The downside is that at $30, it's fairly expensive. However, you can pick up individual add-ins, say, just for Word, for $16.

Microsoft has released information on the pricing for Windows 7 this past Wednesday.  As reported by CNET, the pricing is comparably to Windows Vista pricing.  If you preorder your copy between now and July 11 you will get a substantial discount for the operating system off your choice.  These upgrades will be available at many of the major retailers like OfficeMax Costco and Staples. Be sure to read the full story at the link listed below.

Microsoft sets Windows 7 pricing, upgrade programs | Beyond Binary - CNET News

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I created a quick video showing the taskbar and how it shows you what applications are open and how many instances where views are available to you to access.  In this case what I have is one Internet Explorer window in my Live writer open.  During this demonstration I will open up another tab window in Internet Explorer and you will see that the taskbar will show you a representation of both of those windows.

I thought I had a pretty decent headset and I'm using it with Windows Live Writer and it seems to work OK.  I'm using a Plantronics headset that that has a USB connection. I probably should train the windows speech recognition software several different times to make sure that it has a good sense of my voice to work with. I seem to be spending a lot of time correcting misrecognized words as I am speaking initially.  I'm wondering if there's too much hiss or if I don't have the microphone placed just exactly right.  Well, as in all projects they seem to be ongoing, and ongoing.  I was hoping that I would be able to speak at a normal speed it not have two very carefully enunciated each and every word but if I do slowed down what I am saying it has quite a bit more accuracy.  So, that is obviously the best way to work with it.  You need to speak up slow down your speech and concentrate on not slurring your words and pronouncing them clearly. As I've made some slight adjustments in the way I am speaking to the speech recognition software, the accuracy has increased considerably.  I'm having to make fewer and fewer changes and I am beginning to speed up slightly and still maintain the accuracy as long as I work on enunciating my words as clearly as I can.  So much for this test you can see the accuracy has turned up pretty well.  I still like the fact that windows still has included the speech recognition software right in the operating system so that it can be used in all windows based applications.

While the general feeling about the new Microsoft Search Engine BING is mixed, most tell us that they have found it easy to use, that its results are quite good and they have no real compelling reason to use it over Google or Yahoo. Everyone likes to save money when the are shopping and here is a way to get a few dollars back from many of the stores you may be using online already. I was surprised at the number of vendors that have signed up with Bing to provide these discounts and the percentages that some of them are offering.

How to get started: Like most of Microsoft’s online applications you will need to have a Microsoft Hotmail Account and to get faster rebates you should have a PayPal account. Once you have these setup go to Bing’s Welcome to Bing cashback screen.  The left button provides you with the prompts to get a Windows Live ID and will then have you set up your new cashback account. The right button gives you your login prompt and will launch you into your account screen. Once you have an account setup you will be eligible for payments once your account has reached the minimum $5 limit to process.

Once you have finished setting up your account you are ready to take advantage of your cashback account while shopping. Just make sure you  are using the Bing search engine as your default search engine and that you use it to search for the products you want to buy. Find the best price and Bing will do the rest.

We are constantly being asked by our customers if they need to upgrade to Office 2007 and the real answer to this is not cut and dried. Now that Office 2007 has been in circulation for quite awhile now so the problem that many people who have not upgraded is the inability to read or edit the new Office 2007 XML file format. One way to solve this problem is of course to purchase the upgrade but in many cases all you really need to do is install the Office Compatibility Pack so that you view and work with the newer Microsoft document file formats saved in XML.

Be sure to run all your updates to your system before installing this add in. Read the instructions and  Systems Requirements before you install. Even though it is pretty straight forward you do need to pay attention to the prep work that needs to be done.