Showing posts with label Professional. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Professional. Show all posts

Friday, November 1, 2013

How professional baseball announcer, Joe Block, uses OneNote

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AppId is over the quota

Top-level baseball announcers have their work cut out for them. Over the course of a 162 game season (plus Spring Training and Post-Season), they have to keep track of the statistics and stories of hundreds of players. And, in addition to calling the action as it happens on the field, they have to entertain and inform thousands of listeners between pitches. We spoke with Milwaukee baseball announcer, Joe Block, to see how he makes this daunting task seem so easy. 

Hi Joe! As part of your job, you have tons of information to keep track of. How do you do it?

A lot of people think baseball announcers have a team of assistants and statisticians helping them. Well, we don't. I've found OneNote to be the best option to keep all my player stats and stories together so I can grab any bit of information I need at a moment's notice.

How do you collect all the information?

I do about two hours of research every day. I'll scan baseball websites, read newspapers, and even talk to the players themselves. It's easy to enter everything I learn into OneNote. I can simply copy and paste text from webpages, save a photo or video, type in an interesting story, or jot down a stat from my home computer, tablet, or even my phone. It's all stored in OneNote and accessible when I need it.

How do you call up information so quickly during a game?

I have to be ready for anything and start talking about it at a moment's notice. If there's a game-ending homerun, I have to be able to talk about the last time that particular batter hit one. The last time the pitcher gave one up. And share any interesting anecdotes that I may have heard about the situation. I have all of that information in my OneNote and, using search, I can find it easily and keep talking without missing a beat. 

What did you do before OneNote?

I tried it all. I had stacks of binders. I had crates of note cards. But they were always so big and bulky, and it was difficult to find what I needed when I needed it. OneNote keeps everything together in one convenient place, that I can access from virtually anywhere on my phone, laptop, or tablet.

What else do you use OneNote for?

I also use OneNote to keep track of daily tasks before, during and after the game. I store questions for players, interesting statistics or anecdotes I want to explore further. Considering all that's going on before a game, OneNote helps keep me on point whether I'm in the booth on my tablet or around the batting cages, checking my phone.

There are millions of people, like Joe, who use OneNote to make a difference in their personal, and professional lives. You might be one of them. We'd love to hear how you use OneNote to make your life easier. Share your OneNote story with us in the comments.

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Download OneNote: onenote.com
Follow OneNote: twitter.com/msonenote
Like OneNote: facebook.com/MicrosoftOneNote 


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Thursday, July 18, 2013

Review: Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional Edition does clean OCR and is easy to use

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AppId is over the quota

Anyone who's purchased a multifunction printer or scanner recently will probably recognize the name FineReader, as the Sprint version ships with many such products. Obviously, there are deals being made, but there's no questioning that the program also does a very nice job of OCR. Text extraction is great, though it's not quite as good at recreating complex documents in Word and RTF files as Acrobat or OmniPage.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional ($170, 15-day free trial) is straightforward and easy to use. The main window shows a list of images in a column to the far left, the image being processed in a pane next to it, and the OCR'd text and elements in a pane on the right side. This side-by-side arrangement, shared with OmniPage Standard 18, makes it super-easy to spot mistakes and compare page elements.

Abbyy FineReader 11 Professional's easy-to-understand interface makes it easy to use even if you're new to OCR.

Abbyy FineReader 11 is fast, recognizes text in 189 languages, and outputs in a number of different formats including editable PDFs, Microsoft Word, ePub and even open-source PDF competitor DjVu.

FineReader created a searchable PDF of my yearbook scans just fine, but like OmniPage, it was over-zealous at rotating images trying to find text until I turned off this feature. With most OCR programs, you're better off using Windows' own Photo Viewer to rotate scans to their correct orientation before OCR'ing.

Jon L. Jacobi has worked with computers since you flipped switches and punched cards to program them. He studied music at Juilliard, and now he power-mods his car for kicks.
More by Jon L. Jacobi


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Monday, June 17, 2013

Managing project schedules in Project Professional vs. Project Online / PWA

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AppId is over the quota

Project Professional 2013 and Project Online / PWA are distinct tools which work together, empowering businesses to deliver winning projects while effectively executing and achieving strategic priorities. People across the organization regularly update statuses, manage resource allocations, report progress and balance strategic objectives. These people need different capabilities at different times. 

Project Professional 2013 is the project manager's everyday workhorse. They can easily plan projects and collaborate with others from virtually anywhere, staying organized and keeping projects on track with the only project management system designed to work seamlessly with other Microsoft applications and cloud services.

Project Online and PWA for Project Server link the team together and allow everyone to manage everyday work and collaborate effectively. Management also uses Project Online or PWA to access powerful strategic tools like Project Portfolio Management (PPM).

One of the easiest ways to understand the differences in these tools is to look at their output. Project Professional gives project managers the ability to manage complex project plans and easily synthesize information to guide teams in the right direction and report progress to management. Out-of-the-box reports present project data in an easily consumable format. Each report can be easily customized in an Excel-like experience. Sharing is simple, since reports are optimized for copy/paste.

Most project managers use Project Professional 2013 for the many complex necessities of managing projects and Project Online / PWA when they are away and need to work with their projects. PWA is also ideal for team participants to update their everyday work and collaborate from virtually anywhere. The richness of Project Professional 2013 is seen below, with a few features highlighted to illustrate the unique capabilities of the desktop client.

 

The Team Planner is a particularly powerful tool within Project Professional 2013 which makes it easy for project managers to identify and resolve potential resource overallocations. Issues can be fixed with the click of a button as the scheduling engine automatically moves tasks to avoid schedule conflicts, or manually with drag and drop.

Another important set of distinctions between Project Professional and Project Online / PWA are the user interfaces and variety of views available to visualize and format project data. The web-based interface is ideal for access from virtually anywhere and works in most web browsers, and the Project Professional 2013 desktop client takes advantage of the extra power of the Windows environment to deliver a rich and immersive interface. Here we can see a sampling of additional views available only in Project Professional.

–Mark Sargeant, Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Project


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Saturday, October 20, 2012

Create professional diagrams quickly with the new Visio

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When we started our planning process for this version of Visio, we made it a central goal that it would be easier, faster and more pleasant to create beautiful, professional looking diagrams. To achieve that, we made a host of improvements to the application – far too many for us to cover here. So, for this post, I’ll aim to give you an overview of all the changes we made and cover a few of the most highly requested new features. Later posts will cover everything here in much more detail.

Making diagrams that can effectively communicate information is the heart and soul of Visio. Polished, professional looking diagrams grab attention, inspire more confidence, communicate more effectively and reflect well on the people who made them. It’s always been possible to make good looking diagrams in Visio. This version we not only wanted to make it possible to create amazing looking ones, we wanted to make it startlingly simple. In fact, I might go as far as to say we wanted to make it hard to create bad looking diagrams in Visio (yes, yes – I am sure you could still do it if you tried!)

The foundation for great looking diagrams in the new Visio is the integration of the same rendering engine that PowerPoint uses. So, all the cool effects and UIs you’re familiar with from PowerPoint are now in Visio too!

Visio effects example

All that power is great, but it’s like having a jet fighter without a pilot. It’ll do amazing things, if only you could figure out which button to push! Fortunately, we weren’t just aiming for the fighter pilot demographic. To make it incredibly easy to use all that power to get the look you want, we dramatically overhauled our theming feature. You just need to pick from among over 25 brand new, amazing looking themes and Visio will go and update the formatting on all your shapes to match that style.

Theme gallery

Here’s an image of the same diagram in three different themes. You can change between the following diagrams in a single click, easily moving from simple to vibrant to informal:

Example 1: New themes in Visio

Example 2: New themes in Visio

Example 3: New themes in Visio

Of course, we’ve also made updates across huge swaths of our content to freshen up its look and to take advantage of all the power of our new effects and themes. I’ll call out a few of the templates we’ve updated down at the bottom of this post.

Using Visio has always been great. We love receiving feedback that starts with “I love this program” (and doesn’t follow that with ‘but’)! We wanted to keep pushing on making the program fantastic to use to ensure that people keep finding the experience of using Visio to be efficient, intuitive and even – perhaps – enjoyable!

To achieve this, we invested across the board in polishing the product. We streamlined the ribbon and made our contextual UIs much more complete and focused. More commands than ever are now available right at your fingertips, which helps keep you focused on building your diagram instead of searching through complex UI to find the command you want. Try collapsing your ribbon in the new version and see whether using the right click menus makes you more efficient!

Outside the command space, we fixed hundreds of little road bumps (bugs :) that folks told us about when using the product, and we built out several major features that customers have been craving for a while. We also dramatically simplified our application look, so that the diagrams you’re making will take center stage, instead of needing to compete with Visio’s UI. Lastly, we added a raft of smooth transitions, which make the program much easier to follow, as well as making it a lot more attractive to use.

All in all, we are tremendously excited about how great using the next version of Visio is and we’re thrilled that you all will finally get to give it a try.

Yeah – I’ve got examples. Now that you’ve got the summary, I’d like to dive into a few specifics here. We’ve got later blog posts planned that will cover theming, effects and the command improvements – so I’m going to hold off on them. However, I would like to talk a bit about some of the top requested customer features that we’ve built as well as walk through some examples of templates that we’ve updated.

Change shape is one of the most highly requested customer features we’ve ever had. It’s not hard to see why. How many times have you dropped a process shape and connected it up, realizing later it should have been a decision? Or, have you ever wanted to give your simple decision shape more impact by subbing in one of the cool Visio Workflow shapes?

Changing a shape is now as easy as clicking a button and picking the shape you want. You can change one shape at a time or change several multi-selected shapes at once. This makes it easy to rough in a diagram with temporary shapes and then change to better looking, more accurate, or more appropriate shapes when you are ready to finish the diagram. You don’t have to worry about losing connections, formatting or settings; Visio transfers all that over to the new shape automatically.

Change shape

If you don’t see the shape you want in the Shapes pane, you can use Search to find it and the search results appear in the Change Shape choices. To make changing the shape even quicker, you can use Change Shape from our right-click menu (we call it The Floatee).

Another highly request feature has been the ability to quickly duplicate a page. Right-clicking on the page tab and selecting Duplicate now creates a new page with all of the shapes, formatting and properties of the original. You can use this to quickly create variations of a diagram or to use a particular page as a starting template for many others or to simply explore different layouts – all without risking the contents on your original page. Combining Duplicate Page with Change shape also allows you to quickly try out using different shapes as well.

It’s now much easier to find the shape you want. Search has been updated with new keywords to give better results and the results are organized more clearly and grouped by stencil. You’re shown up to the first four relevant shapes in each stencil and when you find the shape you want you can add it to your diagram or add in the whole stencil to the Shapes Pane with one click.

Find shapes

If you prefer to browse for shapes, we’ve also updated the More Shapes menu to make it easier to preview stencils and let you add or remove multiple stencils at once.

As I mentioned, we’ve also updated a huge portion of our content this release. There’ll be a whole article detailing what we’ve done later, so I just want to give you a taste here to illustrate a few of the changes that we’ve made.

Org Chart has been reworked with 10 completely new styles, each with its own unique look. We’ve made the use of pictures super easy as well. The net result is that in a few clicks you can make org charts with incredibly varied styles that range from minimal to professional to hip to playful – whichever is appropriate for the personality of your team or organization.

Containers were already a powerful tool for diagram creation and they’re even better now. Not only are there new containers for you to use, we’ve also added the ability to format containers with a variety of new looks. Whether you want something purely functional or more stylistic, it’s easy to customize a container. Once you’ve selected a container style you want, you can change the heading style and use themes or quick styles to make it look just like you want.

Example 1: Containers in Visio

Example 2: Containers in Visio

Example 3: Containers in Visio

Like containers, new callouts give you options to give your diagrams a customized look. Callouts have been completely reworked to provide more choices and more formatting options. You can quickly integrate the look of your callouts to your diagram with Themes, or use Quick Styles to draw special attention to a specific callout.

New versions of these diagrams have updated shapes with a simple, modern look. In addition to making it easy to produce incredibly professional looking diagrams, these shapes are updated to include the newest hardware and concepts. We’ve also made the most important semantic details of the shapes more visually salient – making it easier to read large, complex diagrams.

There’s also a new version of the Workflow diagram that shares the modern look. Like the network shapes, you’ll find they can add flavor to other diagrams.

Don’t worry, though, the old 3D network and workflow shapes were so popular and iconic that we couldn’t take them out. So, you can still find them by searching or browsing through the template categories.

The Basic Diagram template is a great toolkit to start a generic diagram or to use in an existing one, and we’ve updated it to give you a wider variety of attractive and useful shapes. You’ll be able to use them to make quick drawings or add them to other diagrams to help illustrate your information. We’ve added lots of new shapes, including decorative shapes, arrow shapes, graph and math shapes.

And even with all that, we’ve just touched the tip of the iceberg on what the new Visio can offer. Check out our upcoming blog posts for deep dives on everything I touched on above.

We hope that you’ll find it easier, faster and more pleasant to create beautiful, professional looking diagrams in Visio than it has ever been before!

We would love to see your comments on this and other blog posts and if there are other topics you’d like to see us cover, let us know.


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Friday, October 19, 2012

A week in my professional life

Divya Upadhyay, friend and coordinator for MITWA News, encouraged me to sum up my typical week at work. Here’s what I came up with…

As I settle down to write this article, I realize it’s going to be hard to describe my “typical week” at work. The beauty of a week in the life of a technical communicator at my workplace is that there is no standard week. Every week is dynamic and brings with it new opportunities, challenges, and projects.

For starters, technical communicators are titled Content and Community Lead at my workplace, which implies that “conventional technical communication” forms only a fraction of our work responsibilities. The organization itself is called Community Help and Learning (CHL). Community Help is the guiding philosophy that documentation should be a curated body of content that leverages user community-created content just as seriously as it leverages conventional technical communication. As an organization, we are pretty focused on tracking how users are searching for and “consuming” the information that we create. Based on search and content-consumption patterns, we decide if a particular article in the documentation is “doing fine” or needs further improvement. This analytical engagement also empowers us to quickly identify the top issues that our customers are facing and drive those issues to closure.

Another core tenet of our organizational culture is multiplexing. While all content leads have their primary product assignments, most of us also work on additional projects and initiatives. We divide our time amongst these projects, constantly reworking our priorities. While that may sound like an awfully busy schedule to an outsider, most of us here would not have it any other way!

Here are some of the ground-level tasks I end up performing every week:

Meet colleagues: I engage regularly with my counterparts in the product engineering, customer service, and business intelligence roles. The discussions with the product engineering teams are largely centred on new features/enhancements and how to best create user assistance content around them. Discussions with the customer support organization, on the other hand, give me insight into the top issues that may require me to create troubleshooting/best practices articles or optimise already-published content. All of these interactions translate into a number of meetings through the week that we keep short and focused.

Also, since most of Adobe products are developed in an agile model, I attend a lot of product scrum meetings in addition to the CHL-level “stand up” scrum meetings every day.

Author content: For much of my working week, I plan and author content deliverables. When I author content, I strive to identify opportunities to represent concepts/procedures as graphics or instructional videos. Infographics, in particular, are an area of interest for me. Doc reviews happen in Adobe Acrobat and I work with the CHL production team to push documents live once they’re ready. Unlike the traditional doc-publishing model aligned with product milestones, we post and update content around the year.

Amplify content: I blog pretty regularly and engage users through social networks/other channels throughout the week. At one level, this engagement helps me drive customers to high-impact content. It also lets me lend a willing ear to customer issues and work with product engineering to address them.

As part of content amplification, I also moderate and post articles to the relevant content community pages—for example, http://blogs.adobe.com/cqpost.

Optimize content: Content optimization involves using Web traffic/content consumption parameters to optimize the reach/effectiveness of key documentation articles. I also keep an eye on the channels — doc landing pages, forums, community pages, etc — through which customers are reaching high-impact content and ensure that I maintain my presence there.

To optimize my content, I rely on reports from my business intelligence counterparts as well as my own research. Over the years, I’ve strived to develop specific skills in this area, including an Adobe Certified Expert certification in SiteCatalyst.

Give product feedback: Internally, technical communicators are recognised as power users of several Adobe applications and suites. Therefore, I often find myself alpha or beta-testing software. My experience helps me suggest usability improvements, workflow tweaks, or even new features that end-users like me find useful. It’s a privilege playing a part in the development of software that enables creative content creation and digital marketing initiatives all over the world.

Dream big: As an organization, we’re involved in several initiatives beyond our core responsibilities.  Some of us have a keen interest in text analytics and developing new methods to further human understanding of language. To that extent, we keep preparing, writing, and publishing IP deliverables. Like many of my colleagues, I also keep working on article ideas/papers for journals and conferences.

My workday, naturally, is also governed by my personal working style. Instead of “switching off” work at a particular hour, I tend to stay connected and work late into the evening. This pattern sometimes spills into the weekend as well. I usually prioritize tasks for the week ahead on Sunday evenings. My “to do” list (often an Evernote document) is flexible and has room for the surprises that the week may have in store. I also maintain a rolling list of long-term tasks essential to my professional growth. This list may include research topics, identified areas of learning, and often an audacious feature/product idea or two. As the week progresses, I ensure that I make some progress on these long-term “to do” items, however small that progress may be.

With that, I’ve pretty much summed up the exciting, challenging time I call my workweek. It offers me a lot of opportunities and little room for inertia. And that is the part I love about it!

 - Samartha Vashishtha


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Saturday, September 15, 2012

Atari and Adobe Flash Professional

Atari and Adobe Flash Professional « Adobe Flash Professional Team Blog function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} adobe.com      Adobe Flash Professional Team Blog / Atari and Adobe Flash Professionalby SuhasAdobe (1)CreateJS (1)Flash (1)Flash Professional CS6 (2)Grant Skinner (1)HTML5 (1)Toolkit for CreateJS (1)  

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Wednesday, April 25, 2012

HTML Animation with requestAnimationFrame and Flash Professional CS6

HTML Animation with requestAnimationFrame and Flash Professional CS6 « Christian Cantrell function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} adobe.com      Christian Cantrell / HTML Animation with requestAnimationFrame and Flash Professional CS6by Christian Cantrell  

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Tuesday, February 14, 2012

Balancing Work and Life as a Creative Professional

Recently, The 99 Percent, a research arm and think tank of Behance, ran a terrific blog post about balancing work and life as a creative professional.

The blog post displays an excerpt from Lewis Hyde’s book, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World, where he describes work as what we do by the hour – for money, if possible. Hyde then differentiates creative labor as something that is harder to quantify – something that has its own schedule and may take longer, such as writing a poem, or creating a painting.

Creative professionals recognize that there is some overlap here, and that the two can often be easily confused. Creatives might try to rush a creative process in the name of work, or work diligently and tirelessly through a long process that required breaks from mental stress and ware for the sake of creativity.

Above all, the two can also easily get mixed up with personal life. It’s easy to get absorbed by a creative task that one wants to complete, while losing track of the direction of one’s life.

Nigel Marsh had an insightful TED talk on this topic last year, which remains relevant to this day. Watch this talk, and then let us know how you plan to balance work, creative labor and life.


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Saturday, April 16, 2011

Professional Edition – New Lower Platform Fee

Professional Edition – New Lower Platform Fee « Adobe Digital Publishing function clearSearch() {document.search_form.s.value = "";} adobe.com      Adobe Digital Publishing / Professional Edition – New Lower Platform Feeby Dave Dickson  

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