 Hey, this is Christian Buckley with another MVP BuzzChat interview and I'm here today with Rick. How's it going? Hi, Christian. Thanks for having me on today. So folks that don't know who you are, where you are, what you do, why don't you do an introduction and give us the background? Well, sure. I'm probably here mostly because I'm a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP. I've been a Microsoft PowerPoint MVP since 2010. So it's my 10th anniversary or last year. It may have been hard to keep track. I've got a number of those little cubes on my statue. Well, now that they've kind of rolled up to the everybody gets renewed or not renewed at the same time, it's like I should be a nine-year office apps and services MVP. I came on board as a SharePoint MVP. So now I'm at the nine and a half year mark, but waiting to see if I get renewed for my night time. Yeah, it's always a situation where you're going, well, if I don't get renewed, I have a lot more time. If I do get renewed, I get to hang out with my friends a little longer. The reality though, and I'm sure it's the same with you, is that we would do the same stuff whether or not we're an MVP. Oh, pretty much, pretty much. Sorry. I mean, in 2010, I joined the MVP program, but that was not when I first became involved with the MVP program because in 1993, I joined the Microsoft PowerPoint development team at Microsoft, full-time employee. And I was on PowerPoint for 17 years, designing and building the application. And for the last 10 or so years of that, I was the program contact with the MVPs. So when I retired from Microsoft, they had this evil little plan in mind already, and they called me back in and said, we want you to be an MVP now. And so I've been an MVP. So my background with the MVP program was about 20 years, and with PowerPoint is 27 years. I don't even remember PowerPoint back in those days. Are there videos out there of what that experience looked like of people demoing things? That'd be fascinating to go and look at. PowerPoint actually existed prior to Microsoft owning it. It was an application that had been developed by a company called Forthott, and they were actively trying to sell it to both Microsoft and Apple at the same time. It was a Macintosh application first. And I think version one was definitely just Mac, and I think version two was Mac as well, and three was the first one out on Windows. I think that's right. And three had pretty much come out just before I joined. So it's been around for a while. Wow. Yeah. I mean, look, I remember back in that era, I mean, I was an Excel user before, back when they had the proprietary macro language. So before they standardized everything, and that kind of broke all of my knowledge that I had built up around Excel. But not that I remember any of that, even that. Oh, I mean, you never forget your spreadsheet. No, of course not. It's funny, because I had spent a couple of years working with Paradox and other database management tools. And did you ever work with VisaCalc? Never worked with VisaCalc. I worked on VisaCalc. Really? So I was there at the beginning of spreadsheets in the Apple II world, largely credited with moving personal computers into businesses. Yeah, that was, so I was back in junior high and high school, you know, spent a lot of time like we bought, we had, I think our first home computer was an Apple IIe, and it, of course, we had, you know, the gaming systems and stuff. Oh, sure. Sure. But not that you never played games on the Apple IIe. Of course not. Well, it was that, what was it, the reverse eye or whatever that came? Oh, yeah, yeah. And Mule was the one that came out on, Donkey was the one on the original IBM PC, like one game that came on the DOS disk. That's interesting. Well, so, you know, it's funny, like, so I do these productivity tips webinars every month with a friend of mine, Tom Duff, and we go through and we talk about it might be, you know, a SharePoint tip, we go, we have 10 tips every month. And there's a lot around productivity, but some of the more popular, and I try to go and I blog on some of the tips that I've shared out there. Some of the most popular tips have been PowerPoint related tips, because people still, you know, use it pretty heavily. And there's, I'm glad to see some of the capabilities. I have to tell you, so I, it's funny, background, I was actually an industrial design major as my first major university. I did two and a half years, I dropped out of the program. I just, I got fed up, because there's so much of it was drawing and pen work. Yeah. And I was doing graphic design for the student newspaper and you know, a bunch of other things that I just, I wanted to do. I just, I couldn't stand spending 10, 15, 20 hours on a single drawing, a technical drawing, and was doing stuff on computer. And I leave the program, I leave that, that university, I go back and visit friends like a year later, all computerized, everything to digital. But I had left the state, I was gone, you know, I wasn't coming back to that. But it, you know, with PowerPoint, like I see these, the people that they do these just incredibly intricate, beautiful presentations and the animation work that they do. And I'm thinking, I don't have time for that. I just, you know, it's gotten easier. But I say one of the coolest features is one of my absolute favorite things has come out in the last five, six years has been the, you know, the AI driven the ideas capability in PowerPoint. It is fantastic. I can dump my images and my text and it go and give me 20 different options. And it's just, it's dramatically improved the quality of the stuff that I show. Yeah. The PowerPoint team keeps very close tabs on our keeps very close touch with the MVPs. And so we're seeing that kind of stuff all the time, giving them feedback. You probably, have you touched on Morph yet? Of course. When Morph was first talked about, yeah. Morph for the animation is probably one of the biggest time savers and provides some amazing results. And not to dismiss the AI stuff, but AI is playing a big part in the future of office applications and PowerPoint probably is one of the more visible places it shows up. Well, I have to ask you as a PowerPoint MVP. So what are the, you know, the kind of the four or five coolest things that you've seen come out of it in recent years? What are the big things that impressed you? We've really touched on one of the biggest ones, which is Morph. I'd have to say before I left Microsoft, one of my big projects was doing the first version of PowerPoint on the web. And we were basically dealing with no support from servers or any of the browsers or anything. So we had to deal with what HTML could do and that was about it. And what they're doing now is nothing short of amazing to me, to be able to get on any computer a PowerPoint presentation in email and open it up and have it go to the browser and render and play animation, allow you edit it. I mean, there are some limitations, but it's just phenomenal what you can do. And there are even tricks to if you're, I'll give you a new one I found out about, that if you've gotten a presentation from somebody in email and you open it up in the web browser, you can actually use the web browser to export it as PDF. Really? So yeah, that's just, I was blown away. I haven't actually done this yet, but it was proposed by someone as a solution to another problem someone had had in their workflow. And it's like, yeah, that'll work. It's just amazing. Well, I mean, just the fact that we've moved from having to install like an office server solution to be able to use the applications and make sure everybody can open the applications to it being encapsulated as part of the downloaded file, somebody you don't have to have Microsoft office installed, and you'll have a little more limited, yes, but you can collaborate and respond to and do some editing and, you know, across all the office applications. It's pretty amazing. And across across platform too. I mean, PowerPoint. PowerPoint is one of the most amazing cross platform features knowing how the file formats work and how data transfers between legacy applications and current applications and cross platform applications. It's having dealt with those problems for so many years. I'm I'm totally impressed by what the team has been doing in the last, you know, in the last 10 years. Well, the Morph capability that you mentioned, I seem to recall that that was a was that a Microsoft RD effort? There was another product or they even called it refer to it Morph, or is that something else? It was back when I'm pretty sure it was I'm pretty sure the Morph that's in the product was entirely done by the team on the R&D stuff. Typically shows up in in in developer builds get demoed, but rarely the R&D team just doesn't doesn't engineer for the kinds of things that the development team has to do with specifically international language dependent issues being able to be backwards compatible that kind of stuff. It's just they're basically proving concepts. Sure. And that's that's the 80% of the work that takes 20% of the time. Well, and that's why I if you were familiar with, you know, I've talked about this on a few different recordings, but like the GitHub pure R&D effort to GitHub. And man, I remember seeing the demo for that and thinking, yeah, man, that's all smoke and bailing wire that's like wires holding that together for the demo. But I could see how directionally it was, you know, help it would go into and shape the product. So we've actually seen capabilities now get moved into, you know, teams and the office, you know, suite of tools. And there's it's in GitHub is no more except I've got an icon still on my phone. It doesn't do anything doesn't open anything. The app is still on my phone. It's cool. But yeah, there's the other thing that is speaking of the web version of stuff. And there's not so I've not been paying attention to, you know, just the pure web version of the browser version of PowerPoint of where there are parity issues and features with the desktop. But the presenter coach capabilities is another one of those tips. And there's a couple really cool things that are the one to be able to go in and run through a practice, you know, a demo of your walk through your presentation. And for it to pull in the audio and the timing of your slides and the continents on your slides as well as the words, pull that in there the transcription come back and identify pregnant pauses ums and oz. It's like a mini it's a mini toast masters built into PowerPoint there. Well, have you seen the automatic subtitling and language translation? That's that's we we were using that at the at the Latin well even at the virtual MVP summit we were using it. So there was some Microsoft translators at separate site and destination with some of that capability has been around for a few years. I did an event now it was a bit, you know, so I was doing an event in Sacramento and speaking we had some Spanish speaking people that were struggling with wanting people to talk slower. So they kind of understood things. I said, let's try this out. And so I set up my laptop in front of me on the translator site. If you're right, you know, I've not looked at it in a few years to know if it's all still there since they're building this into the other capabilities like teams. But with the camera on me, and they were sitting there watching my presentation in the same room, but through the lens of my camera and the translator with headphones, and it was doing real time translation in Spanish. And they were satisfied with it. I don't know how accurate it was. I've got my eighth grade Spanish skills. You know, I think if you watch subtitling with English, you can kind of get an idea as to the the the amount of noise there is introduced in language. It's it's it's come a long way. It's still has a long way to go, but it's come an amazing long way in the last decade. And we'll get better and better as we go. And especially with people developing translation dictionaries and phonemes and stuff for individuals, I think is is the real the real test is when when there's a one to one speaker to translator relationship. Right. Well, I know that with this as far as the accuracy again, I don't know how many languages are supported now. I know that with my daughter who's fluent in Tagalog, I had her like look look at some of the translations of this. How accurate is that she's like actually that's she was surprised at how accurate it was. There was a few little things, but I had had more to do with the tone, the speaker, that it was with the translation. But yeah, there's just some amazing capabilities. Anything else that kind of strikes you? You know, I'm really I'm really upset right now because I've seen some demos recently and I can't remember if they're they're approved for public distribution. Always be careful with that. So I've got to hold back. But there's there's if it's not I mean, there's some stuff, amazing stuff coming out in the future. And there's stuff that has just come out that's pretty incredible too. So yeah, it's I'm I'm very proud of my past association, my current association with PowerPoint, because with all respect to the other applications, nothing demos better than PowerPoint in these days. And I'm I'm always excited reading through release notes on any any office update. I'm a big word user, I'm a big Excel user. But the stuff that comes out for PowerPoint, you just kind of go, man, the whole move to agile development in the office team, I is something when I left office, I actually got trained in agile for another couple of projects. And I kept on thinking, how would I have ever tried to get this, this, this development methodology to work in office. And it was just like, office was just so stuck in its old ways. And to within 10 years, have them turning around such that they're releasing new features every couple of months, that just blows me away. They release more features than we then we would release in three in six months, they really more features than we release in three years. It's, I think that we're having the same, we're going to see the same kind of change, fundamental change to what we see being built based on this whole experience, this whole work from home, it's, it's, it's forced companies, so just every industry to rethink what a lot, I've worked in collaboration technology, most of my career, that's kind of, you know, my space project portfolio management found my window knowledge management in collaboration technology. And the vast majority of companies that I've worked for or with did not support work from home policies. And companies that are building the technology wouldn't allow their employees to work from home and use their technology to build the technology. So I think this is forced companies to, to really think, Hey, we could do this. And if not everyone sides will chunks. And that's why I think that the commercial real estate is going to be in a tank for a long time because of this. Yeah, it's funny in the valley. Of course, you have Apple has just developed their, they just opened in the last two years, the, the flying saucer. Yeah. And that's all open plan. And I suspect there's going to be people who are going to want to be going back into the, the individual office of the older buildings. And they may be looking to re-engineer some of that, some of that structure. But, you know, it, there's no, there's no, there's no consensus on work for home versus, versus work in the office. I mean, there are companies I mean, there are companies that I think Facebook has been saying that they want people to come back in. But Twitter, I basically said, work for home, from home for the rest of your life. I think that's right. Yeah, I think you're right. That, depending on your concept of product development, and especially, I think it's going to come down to this has given us a considerable hunk of time to judge productivity in this environment, which has always been the managerial reluctance that the middle managers, if they can't be watching people working, they're not sure that any work's getting done. So this, this has been, this has been quite a, quite an experimental environment to test out some of the, to get some real metrics on it. Well, I think that's, you know, kind of where I was going with that too is that, look, I think it's going to have a direct impact on the types of features people want to see with a product like PowerPoint, which it'll be used in, you know, maybe even in a more of a real time, almost like a, I don't know, I'm just, I'm just thinking out loud here, but like, you know, within a white board scenario. So it's presenting part of it, but you're working and moving pieces around on it. We were just, we were just in a conversation about that, that, that as well. And I was pointing out that you, you can get in these presentations, specifically with engineers, but you know, engineers are just a different breed, where they actually present in edit, in the edit view, they don't go into slide show view. And they're showing the slides. And I was trying to think from the standpoint of product development, could there be a, a mode that you went into that kind of left the tools there, but diminished them a bit until you want to use them, but was still edit mode. So you can move stuff around on the screen. And they're not far from, from doing that kind of, that very kind of thing. And that's, that's typically, you know, when you go into zoom, you've got the video conference, you've got, you've got, you have your different environments, you can bring up your, your plugins for whiteboards and other tools. I did see an interesting demo from Prezi, where they were doing kind of, for folks that don't know Prezi to a few years back, that was supposed to be the PowerPoint killer. And instead what it gave is people a motion sickness, but it's a cool application though. It's funny because I met with those guys right after I left Microsoft and I was telling them, you know, you really have to give users control over, whenever you'd move from here to here, the camera go way up and then come back down. And that's the motion sickness thing. You really need to give users some control over that. Maybe they just want to slide over me a little bit of thing. And they were just like, no, no, this is the way. And I go, you realize the one thing feedback we got unexpected feedback we got in PowerPoint was that behaviors within the application that identified what they were, what people were seeing as PowerPoint were things that they wanted to diminish to the point that when you move your mouse on and you see the little control bar at the lower left hand corner, we had to put something in there to turn that off. So the people would never see PowerPoint UI on the screen because people were just saying, no, no, we don't want anyone to be thinking about it's a PowerPoint presentation. We just want them to see the information. So Prezi was really kind of branding themselves with this motion sickness. But they did, they did something really cool where they now are doing, they have a Prezi video. And so basically, your, your talking head is the background. And then things come in on the side and you become part of the data display of your talk. It's really quite cool. It's a great idea. I mean, give them a call and ask them to give me another account so that I can try it out. I've got a good friend who is the, was the kind of in all the SharePoint events that I would speak at around the world. He was the token Prezi guy, you know, the representative there. He was a SharePoint MVP, you know, but he just was really passionate about the technology. I mean, I, my favorite thing is, you know, one of the cool things simple Prezi would be to have an image and then be able to, you know, zoom in to like the pixel and then have this whole eye chart of whatever it was and then zoom back out. I mean, that was just, I don't think that is still possible within PowerPoint in the same way. Actually PowerPoint implemented some features that will do exactly that kind of thing. Really? I mean, it's a combination of Morph and some, I've forgotten the name of the name, but you can actually on a slide, you can, if you're work editing a slide, you can drag a slide miniature from left out onto the, on onto the slide area. And that creates a link to that slide. And then there's a, there's a feature called zoom where you will zoom in on that translation. You can basically do the same thing as, as the zoom and Prezi. And in fact, because of the way slides work and the way you can, you can kind of hide the fact that it's a slide by making the image background the same as background of the original one. So you're just looking at like a train, like a icon of a train, you click on it and it grows out and then all the wheels are spinning or it moves along, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's a combination of a couple features that do that. But yeah, they, Prezi is still a valid, a valid platform for, for a number of people. I mean, a lot of, a lot of, a lot of young people like, like experimenting in it and, and they like saying they're not using PowerPoint, I think mostly. Yeah, it, you know, it does the job, it does a great job at it. Yeah, I'm still, look, I know that there are, there are people that are much more artistic that will go and they do these beautiful presentations, which they, you feel like you're not looking at a bunch of slides. The stuff that I do, I don't, where I don't need to have it that, that beautiful, that rich and stuff. I like to have as part of a presentation, the animations and, and, you know, different things, but it's, I mean, I'm always thinking of, you know, what's going to be the next step for this? It's not just me giving a presentation. I have sessions, which I never hand out the slides on. I've given a, there's a, the last keynote that I did for the ARMA conference, for example, you know, didn't, didn't share that out, or, or shared a few of the slides as in PDF format, where it was much more about the visuals that, but the majority of stuff that I do, the intention is they're immediately published out to SlideShare. People want to get their hands on them. So I'm, and I'm not reading through all the text, but I'm providing all the content that's there within the notes or on the, on the, on the screen for it to be a downloadable asset. It's, it's not that it's right or wrong. It's the, I'm, it's a different intent, different purpose and, and result that I'm, I'm intentionally building. It's a very, it's a very common workflow. And it is, unfortunately, the thing that does lead people to read their slides. And it is, and it does contribute to, I have a slide, well, let me talk about two of the things that I do. I'm the founder of the San Jose branch of Pachakacha, which is a Japanese presentation style started in, in Tokyo. And it, it basically, it was a bunch of architects that were going to have a presentation and have a conference and they wanted to have no boring PowerPoint slides. So they came up with two rules. First rule was every slide deck has exactly 20 slides. Second rule was every slide advances automatically after 20 seconds, no more, no less. And what this did was it focuses the presenter on, on presenting the essential meaning of their presentation, the core and just working it down to exactly what they need to tell the audience and keeping things moving. Typically, when we, when I work with, with presenters for these events, I recommend that they have little to no text on the slides, that the, that the, the message is in what they say. And the slide is reinforcing and supporting that message. And we, it's such a successful format, most of my events are held in bars and we're, we open it up to anybody who wants to come. We have volunteer presenters and we just have a blast for an evening of presentations. And I just remind people, when was the last time you thought you were going to sit down and watch 12 presentations in the evening for fun. But we, I'm currently just this morning, I wrote the first instruction mail to a new group of, of digital arts students at San Jose State. We're going to do an event in July. And we're going to do it virtual. So we'll be doing the presentations and everything over, over Zoom, I expect we're going to be using Zoom. And I'm looking forward to that, because I've done a couple of, I've done a couple of events now using Zoom. There are some things we can, we're limited to. But one of the big things is audience feedback. Because you can't, you can't typically judge how you're being received. There's no cues back and forth. I try and see if we can leave the microphones open, because sometimes they're ooze and oz and stuff. Well, there are other webinar platforms that have little more robust tools they could actually see, do people click and open up their email? So you actually lose, you see the attendance. So you're actually getting real time data about whether people are, now they could be sitting in the back with their eyes closed. You have no idea because they're in the browser. But, you know, there's a little more data around it, which I think I find really, really interesting that attentiveness. But the other thing I have to say, because I'll get all kinds of upset friends, if I don't, is that a few years back, a number of PowerPoint MVPs and some other people outside of the organization got together and we founded the presentation Guild. And I've been on the board of directors of that. I think we're into, well, it's, let's just say five years, but that was, that's the same people that were at the beginning of the Wizard of Oz. No, that's the Lollipop Guild. Okay, so this is, this is an organization that basically supports trains and recognizes presentation professionals, people who more companies should hire to make sure that their, their presenters are speaking well, that their documents are well created, that their messages are on target, that everything you want to happen, correct in a presentation happens that way. So we've got any number of, of graphic, graphic designers who work specifically in tools like PowerPoint. And we have a credentials program where you can come in and take training to be a certified presentation, present, present, we've been, we've got three levels planned, we have the first one done and we're, we're, we're issuing certificates now, based on tests that people can take. But we have a membership, a website, we have a Slack channel, we have, we have events, we take place, we take part of the part in the presentation summit once a year, which again is going to be virtual again this year. And yeah, so we're the, a lot of the people who are involved in this are PowerPoint MVPs. So it's a good group of people. What's the Japanese, the style, what is that presentation style called again? It's called petchakucha, P-E-P-E-T-C-A, pardon me, P-E-C-H-A-K-U-C-H-A, petchakucha. Because, because the, the whole TED talks movement kind of initially started around that same concept of a certain length, maybe it wasn't that. More digestible. It's not, uh, TED is not as strict and, uh, but yeah, the, it's kind of the difference between a performance art and haiku. You know, petchakucha is definitely the haiku. It's, it's the very precise. There's another one called, what's it called? It's got the same name as the Microsoft Development Event. But anyway, they, they do 15 slides in 15 seconds or something like that. They just changed the numbers up a bit because the petchakucha, petchakucha organization, you actually have to be, uh, awarded the found, the foundation for a city where Ignite, that's it. Ignite, Ignite can be used by anybody. So, yeah. But I know that, uh, so I attended twice events in downtown Seattle, um, that were something similar where it was five minutes long at auto. Like they had no control over four slides. They got up there and it was, they, they kind of stood over on this round carpet on the side of the spotlight on them with the slides that were just going. And it was, uh, when you were talking about, you know, I never thought I'd be sitting here watching people give presentations on a broad array of topics of anything somebody was talking about. They did a whole session on a cancer cell and then somebody else talked about, you know, something else, technology, somebody else was just telling funny childhood stories. It was fantastic. Yeah. That's, that's what my, my usual events are like that. They're not themed. Uh, when I do stuff for the, what I'm doing right now is for the San Jose Museum of Art. And those tend to be more people from the same organization and same background or their city civic leaders or planners, um, our local art people. But when I have a regular event, it could be anyone from, uh, a father telling the story of what it was like to raise an autistic or a child, or it could be, um, someone just explaining how they made their, their Brady Bunch style, uh, one person in all the cells, they're all the same guy seeing, you know, as a whole, a whole session on that. Uh, I, I, I had, uh, the people who, uh, created, what's the name of the company where you, you rent other people's houses? Oh, Airbnb. Airbnb. So the president of Airbnb, like a couple of months before he started the company came by and did a presentation about this idea he had for renting out other people's houses. It was, it was great. We, we, the, the diversity of, uh, uh, an evening of fetch a couch is, uh, is terrific. Well, I know that you've got, uh, you know, on your website, you, you have your, uh, you've got links to a few of these different things. And to all provide in the blog posts and stuff around this, you know, link over to that. But what, where else can people want to find out more about this stuff or about you and get in touch? What, what is the best place to reach you? That's absolutely the best place. Um, I'm lucky enough to have a bizarre last name and a slightly unusual, not as, not as unusual as when I was in middle school, but, uh, my first name is Rick RIC without a K. My last name is Brett Schneider, 13 letters with five consonants in a row in the middle. And so my dad always went by Brett. So I go by Rick Brett, R-I-C-B-R-E-T. And I'm Rick Brett on Facebook, on Twitter, um, on Insta, no, not on Instagram, uh, Instagram. I had to go with something else because, uh, long story. Um, but, uh, you can, you can pretty, it's, I'm pretty easy to find. Well, you know, I really appreciate the, you know, talking, I've got some stuff to go take a look at as well here, but, uh, yeah, now I'm interested to find out if there's any of these groups, uh, you know, officially here in the Salt Lake area, I'll have to go check it out if there is. I'm pretty sure there's one in Salt Lake. There's gotta be. There's gotta be. There's over a thousand worldwide. One last question on that. Is there, uh, etiquette for watching those things? Like when they wrap up, does everybody sit there snapping? Is it like a bit hipster? No, it's, it's pretty much straight up applause and, and, uh, and, and cheers. It's funny because, um, as, as the emcee for the events, I always have to tell people that when they're done, don't run away from the stage, hang around for the applause, hang around for questions. But yeah, we just did. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's not, it's not a hipster thing. You could do that. That's the typical to see that, but that's the normal for, you know, you wrap up a presentation and there's already somebody at the door of the next group trying to get into the conflict. Right. Right. Because you took too long, right? Yeah. That's right. Doesn't happen with Pochakacha. That's right. Well, really appreciate your time today. Really, it's great to, uh, to get to know you and to learn more about this stuff. It's been fun, Christian. Thanks for having me. Thanks a lot.