My First Experience as a speaker

I just wanted to write my experience of the first ever presentation i made as a Speaker in one of the local technology group. So here it is.

On June 27 www.MysoreGeeks.com along with www.MeraWindows.com scheduled what is known as Community Launch Event. This time we were doing the community launch event of Office 2010. Thanks to Dr. U. B. Pavanaja for giving me a chance and a slot to speak at the event.

I took nearly 1 week to have my slide deck prepared. I went through almost 3 to 4 templates within this time. I would take up one template put all the content – play around with the animations and transitions – must say 2010 has a lot more of cool animations and transitions. When i would go through the whole slide deck i would say – naah lets check another template. So this went on for nearly with another 3 to 4 templates. Finally i settled down for a template – keeping in mind that – people would be interested in what i speak and how i present than how my template looks.

On the day of the event, was present at the venue i think 45 minutes early. The event took place @ “Center for Management Studies” block in SJCE – Sri Jaya Chamarajendra College of Engg. Mysore. SJCE happens to be my college meaning i graduated from this college 10 years ago. Yup in Aug 2000 – i passed my Bachelors of Engineering in Industrial & Production. Wondering how come a production engineer ended up into software industry – well i had a computer language in my curriculum called – FORTRAN. Does any body remember FORmula TRANslation any more. Well i was fascinated by this and ended up learning JAVA and Active Server Pages (ASP) and eventually end up in .NET technology. So when i walked through the campus again after 10 years it was some emotion going through me.

Now back to the event – the auditorium where i was to deliver my first presentation was an excellent place. When i reached the place only the  organizers were there. So the whole hall was empty. I took a moment to make myself accustomed to the environment. I have never done a public speaking before this day. I used to occasionally present couple of things in front of my team – that’s it. But this was much more than that. Since this being my first ever presentation i wanted to be perfect. So i hooked my laptop to the projection system and did a quick dry run myself. I must say i did have a jinx at that moment. Was nervous too.

Once i had done all my setup and dry runs – it was time to see how many people turn up to the event. Myself and Dr. U. B. Pavanaja had tweeted a lot on the twitter and posted it on the Facebook and stuff. But we didn’t get the expected audience. There were totally around 15 people who came for the event. We were happy that at least we had that many :).

First to present was Pavanaja. He took the session on What’s new in Office 2010 from the perspective of Word/Excel/PowerPoint. He did have a colorful slide deck with all the new transition that PowerPoint 2010 supports. It was fun to listen to him and his hands on demo.

Second speaker of the day was Mr. Renuka Prasad from Tech Mahindra. He took a session on OneNote 2010.

The last session of the day was mine. My session was on “Office 2010 Ribbon Customization – for end users”. I was trying to address the forte of how an end user i.e. one who uses office to just create documents and read documents – how they can customize the ribbon according to their needs. Prior to Office 2010 the customization of Ribbon was a developmental effort/solution. It was not something an end user could have done it with some mouse clicks. With Office 2010 the customization is just few clicks away. I must say that the whole presentation of mine went very well. Luckily i gained confidence as i went into the presentation. I was able to speak out all the things i had imagined i would say during the talk. So all is well that ends well.

I must thank the Office Team for the content to my presentation. They have an excellent article titled “Make the Ribbon Mine”. You can find it here. That’s the best article i could figure out pertaining to this area. So thanks Office Team.

The photos of the event are present at the following location:

Office 2010 - Mysore Community Launch Event

Mysore Geeks - Office 2010 community launch

I also have recorder my whole session. It needs some cleaning up and compression things to be done before i upload it to web. Will upload in a couple of days time and update the post. Also the slide decks will be uploaded.

Do let me know your comments suggestion or whatever you have :). it will help me to shape myself for further presentation.

Till next time, happy coding. Code with passion.

Adios…