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An Interview with Sonia Coleman
Interviewed by Geetesh Bajaj
Sonia Coleman (pictured to the left) is the owner of SoniaColeman.com,
an amazing site that's got tons of PowerPoint content. Sonia is
among the most active PowerPoint MVPs (Most Valuable Professional)
- you can often find her in the PowerPoint newsgroups answering
questions and resolving problems.
Sonia also creates PowerPoint
add-ins that simplify the task of
creating autorun CDs. In addition, she is an artist who does
photography, sewing and needlearts, collage and stamping, a bit
of painting,
etc. She also works on freelance projects for clients. Learn
more about Sonia at her site:
SoniaColeman.com
Geetesh:
Sonia:
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Tell us more about how you got into developing these
amazing add-ins for PowerPoint.
Soon after retiring from a 26 year career in computer application
development, I made a trip to Thailand in late 1999. I returned
with hundreds of wonderful photographs of the country and
the people. I wanted to share them with family and friends,
so I created a PowerPoint presentation. However, then I needed
a means of distributing the presentation to a wide range
of people. It had to run on all versions of Windows. It couldn’t
depend on the user having PowerPoint on their system, and
basically it just had to be totally automated, only requiring
that the user put it in their CD drive. I stumbled into the
PowerPoint newsgroup and asked for help. The great people
there were very patient and taught me how to create an autorun
CD.
Having been successful, I realized that others might want
to do the same, so I wrote a tutorial to teach the process
and put it on my website. Steve Hetrick, a talented coder,
saw it and contacted me with the idea of automating it. Working
together we released our first version of Autorun CD Project
Creator (ACDPC) a couple of month later. However, user support
became pretty taxing and there were improvements that were
needed, so we invested a lot of time in enhancing the software
and the documentation and released version 2.0 with a modest
purchase price. We released a Pro version soon after that,
and last year we replaced ACDPC with PowerLink Plus which
is our version of the packaging function that is new in PowerPoint
2003. If you use PowerPoint 2003 you don’t need PowerLink
Plus.
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Geetesh:
Sonia:
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Your site is such a vast resource of PowerPoint information
- tell us more about how the site evolved.
My website began simply as a place where I could document
and share what I had learned about digital art. However,
after becoming involved with PowerPoint, the focus shifted.
As time passed I started writing tutorials to share what
I had learned. I tend to add to the site as a pattern of
new user questions develops. When I began, people were just
beginning to migrate from PowerPoint 97 to PowerPoint 2000.
Since then PowerPoint 2002 was released and now users are
beginning to move to PowerPoint 2003. However, my site still
features a large gallery of some of the artwork created by
my nephew and me.
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Geetesh:
Sonia:
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How has Microsoft's MVP program helped you.
I’ve met a lot of great people in the program and at
Microsoft, of course. It’s great to be part of a network
of extremely knowledgeable and helpful folks. I tend to learn
from others and having access to such a wealth of talent
means that I am constantly learning.
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Geetesh:
Sonia:
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How good is the interaction you have with Microsoft?
How does it make a difference to you and the PowerPoint
team?
Our interaction is now excellent. It wasn’t always
that way, but Microsoft has really demonstrated how much
they value the MVP’s and what we have to say. In the
case of PowerPoint they listen to us and they share with
us on a regularly scheduled basis, and they are always available
whenever issues or problems crop up.
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Geetesh:
Sonia:
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How do you typically use PowerPoint?
I primarily use it for testing and for some private contracting
that I do. I always seem to be testing our own products or
new products being developed by Microsoft and others.
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Geetesh:
Sonia:
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You do a lot of freelance PowerPoint projects - what
type of work is involved?
Right now I only have one client for whom I do private contracting.
I design market analysis slides for the client, a very large
technology company. The slide designs, which primarily contain
charts and tables, are then handed off to coders who incorporate
them into an application that pulls data from their vast
database and churns out PowerPoint presentations. Corporate
users can then pick and choose from a vast menu of options
offered by their online system, and within seconds a presentation
file is delivered to them via email anywhere in the world.
My job is to ensure that every slide produced by the system
adheres to corporate branding and to the strict slide layout
specifications we have developed. A single slide design can
be used by the system to produce a thousand slides in a year
and depending on the options selected, the data can be different
on each of them. It’s a very efficient use of PowerPoint.
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Geetesh:
Sonia:
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What do you think about the current controversy that blames PowerPoint
for everything from space shuttle disasters to failed meetings?
Hogwash! It’s a bit like a farmer blaming the plow
for a bad crop. PowerPoint is a tool for presenting content.
If the content is inaccurate or incomplete, or it’s
presented badly, you certainly can’t blame the tool.
The time and energy used to blame PowerPoint should be used
to teach and promote good presentation techniques.
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