Vista/Office '07 Launch Event

Gave my Office 2007 and Vista launch event presentation today, and I think it went quite well overall. To entice people into the room (not easy on a Wednesday afternoon with a coursework deadline at 3pm) I popped out to Tesco with Alex in the morning and loaded up on a bunch of junk food for everyone - party rings, kettle chips, jammie dodgers...you see where this is going.

Got somewhere between 40 and 50 people turning up to listen to me, which I was pretty pleased with. I'm sure I saw one or two people sneak in at the end just to get the free food though, tut tut. Microsoft had also given me a bagful of goodies to hand out, most of which went in a little mini-raffle sort of thing, but I did give out a couple of the better prizes for people who asked good questions.

Everyone was naturally impressed with the pretty shiny features of Vista - it was a pity I couldn't have gotten Ultimate up and running for features like Dreamscene, but Business showed off most of the power, and I did try to concentrate on actual features rather than just looks anyway.

Office came next, again, this wasn't so much a presentation as just me demo'ing the product, which I thought would be far more effective. I gave it a bit of a relevant theme to half the people in the room - I showed how that afternoon's coursework could be made to look really professional with the use of just a few clicks in Word and Excel '07. The web fanboys also enjoyed seeing the .docx opened up as xml instead of the horrible compressed format you used to get with .doc.

Obviously, I had to end by pimping the Student Partner scheme, and I think I've got a couple of proteges lined up to take over from me next year, along with a few reps too.

Thanks to everyone who turned up, hope you had a good time (or at least enjoyed the goodies and the food) :) Here's some photos of me looking like a tit, and of some of the nice stuff given away ;)

Someone remind me why the screen is approximately 40 feet away from the microphone?


"Hi, is this the OSX presentation?".


The goodies (minus those I gave out during the presentation).


The food (minus that nabbed by some over-eager students).


They seem oddly interested in two sheets of paper...