MGI
Milt Hull introduced MGI's Dave Whittle by explaining that Dave used to work at IBM in charge of Team OS/2. Dave responded, saying that he makes it a rule never to talk about OS/2 in the presence of anyone from Microsoft; he gets a little emotional because that's a chapter in his life best forgotten, but a good time even so. He admits to being IBM's first and only "OS/2 evangelist" and got permission to list that title on his business card, something that was not exactly within IBM's way of doing things.

VideoWave
Dave got a laugh by claiming his demo took a long time to load because he was using Windows Media Player, but he uses it because it works. He started by showing a home movie that his 16-year-old son, Justin, made using MGI VideoWave. Dave, using his camcorder, took the videos, and his son, having no prior experience, created the movie, creating a soundtrack by adding an MP3 file (he is a jazz musician), the kind of thing a 16-year-old can do in a few hours.

Dave loaded VideoWave to show how the program works. The interface sports a library that shows the various clips you've filmed, which you ultimately combine in scenes—with transitions in between—to make a movie.

It is the same technique used in all movies, television shows, commercials; everything follows the same format according to the story line that, in this case, appears at the top. There is a preview window with VCR-style controls to show what is being worked on. There is a cutting room; a dark room; a place to create special effects, for titling, for text animations, and transitions; a place to blend more than one scene so that they run at the same time. There is also an audio studio capture, an automatic scene detection and time warp for slow and fast motion.

Having explained the interface, he then proceeded to demonstrate the process using clips of Shay Lynn doing some of her ice skating routines and speaking during an interview. He was able to edit her speech in the cutting room to take out the unimportant parts. He was able to stop a frame, save it as a still photo, and then extract part of the image and combine it, using Image Blend, with others to make composite images. It is possible to remove individual colors, animate the text, and other cool things. To animate text, type what you want, choose any font from your system, change the face and the outline, change the shadows and shadowing effects, the colors of the shadows, the degrees of transparency or opacity, fade it in or out. When he finished, he had a one-minute video clip of 30 megabits. When you have done all these things, the video is the way you want it—it can then be saved to a CD or to a DVD for a camcorder or TV.

Some technical information: The video measures DVAVI 720 by 480 NTSC; the audio is 32 kilohertz in 16-bit stereo. Dave suggested that most of us don't know that this is associated with DVD or a full-screen playback. The video that you play back on a PC is mpeg2, 640 by 480. VideoWave does all the hard stuff by creating templates for these formats.

He says that if you are really good, you can create your own templates, the ones that are most common for you, but MGI has made some that are the most common in the industry, including mpeg1, mpeg2, Microsoft Streaming, Windows Media Player, Real Video, Video CD, Video e-mail, and Video on a CD-ROM. Mpeg2, Dave explained, is the format on broadcast satellite television, on cable, and digital cable. It is a very high-compression, high-quality video format. VideoWave has the best mpeg2 compression in the industry, even faster than Adobe Premium.

Dave pointed out that VideoWave has received excellent reviews, shared PC World's Editors' Choice Award with Adobe Premium for high-end professional-level video editors. In the category for low-end, inexpensive, easy-to-use, consumer-level video editors, VideoWave won all by itself. Adobe, he says, sells for $800 or $900 depending on where you buy it. This means you don't have to spend a lot of money unless you are a very serious professional. VideoWave outsells everything else, with over 50 % of the market. VideoWave's retail price is $99.95.

PhotoVista Virtual Tour
The PhotoVista Virtual Tour is three products in one: 3-D Objects, PhotoVista Panorama, and Virtual Tour. Virtual Tour puts everything together as Dave demonstrated.

He showed a Web page that he had created using Virtual Tour. He took the pictures, most without a tripod, using a regular digital camera, and put them together into a 360-degree panorama using MGI PhotoVista Virtual Tour. The project took him fewer than three hours—taking the photos, copying them to his PC, creating the page and even learning the program—to do the entire tour. It's that simple, he said.

He walked around his neighborhood, took some pictures, and stitched them together, which easily integrates all aspects of the different photos horizontally and vertically. He created hot spots in the tour, which allow you to move the mouse over, click and, say, enter his house and take a tour of it. While in the house, you can zoom around, look where you want, click on the available hot spots and open a box, the refrigerator, or click to see a view of the back yard.

To create the panorama, you take a series of pictures, overlapping by one-third and moving in a circle until you have what you want. You can do a full 360 degrees, as Dave showed with a panorama taken from Coit Tower in San Francisco. A camera with a 50-millimeter lens works reasonably well, but is not as high a resolution as you might want.

To create 3-D Objects, you set the camera on a tripod and rotate the object varying degrees. Dave showed a picture of an African musical instrument that was stitched together from multiple levels and shown from many angles. The image can be shown in different formats; Dave set it up for a Java viewer so that anyone who has Java or a compatible viewer can see the image. You can create a virtual reality, 3-D image for eBay. PhotoVista Virtual Tour is a high end product and its retail price is $259.95.

PhotoSuite 4 Platinum Edition
Dave says that he likes to show this one off, it is fun to work with. PhotoSuite is a program that lets us organize, edit, and share our photos. We can get the photos from a number of sources: scanners, PCs, albums, CDs, and such.

The program will open vector-based formats, hybrid formats, and many commercial sources of photographs. You can find out what kind of file you have by looking at the list of available formats contained in the program. You can open a photo in one format and save it in another. You edit pictures in Prepare. You can Compose pictures on pages, package them in bundles. The program has numbers of templates for setting up pages and albums and such.

He said that one of the criticisms is that you can't print multiple pictures on one page. He says that is true in print mode, but if you compose pages of pictures, then you can print the page. Setting up the page is easy. You drag the photos you want, the program orients them according to whether they are in portrait or landscape mode, then you go to Print and get a wysiwyg image that you can adjust and then print.

To show the album management features, Dave went to the section under Organize and found a project he had been working on, a demonstration album. A collection by Jerry Downs is an album that comes with the Suite. It contains a group of pictures of animals, cities, landscapes and vistas, "and all kinds of good stuff," flowers, plants, people; all royalty-free pictures. The program stores photos in thumbnails that can be accessed as needed. Right-clicking on one brings up a menu where you can choose Properties and get information on the picture, and even search for one.

Dave then spent a few minutes showing how to edit photos and the numerous things one can do to the image: eliminate red eye, modify features of people, touch up, remove scratches, rotate, and crop. He played around with one image, making all sorts of changes and distortions to the face in the image.

After editing a photo, you can e-mail it from PhotoSuite to your friends and enemies, or create Web images. Within PhotoSuite, you can create panoramas, or edit animated gif files good for Web sites like the one of the dancing baby.

Dave showed how to stitch together multiple photos of a single object that is otherwise difficult to photograph in order to create a single image of the object. He used pictures of a lighthouse, a very tall object, stitching three partial photos to create one that showed the whole thing. The original images in the photos need to be overlapped by about one-third. It will stitch as many as 48 separate photos. The program also now accepts PhotoShop plugins.

Questions and Answers:
One person said that in his VideoWave 3, the sound and picture would not stay synchronized. Going from scene to scene, about three or four minutes into the video, the sound and image would become uncoupled. Dave couldn't figure that out, since both the images and sound are recorded in the same file, and wondered if the questioner had somehow uncoupled the two. The two decided to discuss the problem after the session.

Do you support easily getting thumbnails as well as full sized images out to the web?

MGI, with Kodak and Intel, formed a Web site called Gather-Round that automatically uploads your pictures in an album in PhotoSuite. You can create an account from your own software, and the storage is free. You can send e-mail to tell people how to log in to view the pictures using your e-mail address and the password you provide.

There are also templates to create your own Web site based on albums that will show thumbnails. But Dave was not certain if the thumbnails could be expanded to full-sized photographs.

In saving images in certain formats, is the information about the original scanning resolution saved? For example, in .tif files, if a photo is scanned at 200 dots per inch, the information is kept as part of the file.

Dave was not certain on this point as well and offered to discuss the problem offline, so to speak.

Microsoft
Microsoft's Eric Johnston next exposed us to the new Office XP.

He has demonstrated Microsoft's products for us before (he is no stranger to Sacramento: it used to be his home town; he went to Sac State, as well).

Eric is a channel marketing representative who speaks to PC user groups and trains resellers like CompUSA, OfficeMax, and Office Depot, and says that if we find that the sales people in stores like these "don't know what they are talking about," he wants to know.

MS has added a bunch of new features to Office to create Office XP (the XP stands "for experience," Eric says) all intended to make getting one's work done more efficiently and quickly, "to have a smarter, more efficient way to get our work done," he says.

While many individuals probably use Office for their personal work, his presentation was aimed more at groups working together than at the individual, or home user. MS has concentrated on three aspects or "experiences" of Office XP: Collaborative, Organizational, and Personal. Collaborative allows several people to review and revise documents more efficiently; Organizational allows the IT administrator to install and maintain the program on thousands of machines, in different languages, in an entire organization throughout the world.

But Eric wanted to spend most of his time talking about the Personal. It is, he says, intuitive and does not require relearning everything. Before he began his presentation he wanted to point out that if for some very strange reason your computer should crash, the auto save files are new and very easy to find.

Word
As Eric launched Word, the Task Pane appeared on the left side of the screen. The Task Pane allows us to open templates and previous documents, just as we have done in the past, but it sort of automates the process. It is especially useful if you, like many people, stash documents in a number of different files and subdirectories all over the hard drive, and not necessarily in "My Documents."

We can now customize it to suit ourselves, something we couldn't do in previous versions of Word. With the mere push of a button, we can add additional folders to our "Favorite Places." For those people who have multiple computers, with multiple documents on multiple systems, they can map them all to their own machine without going through their network manager.

The Task Pane is a new document wizard, a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get) formatting agent allowing changes in style and formatting; it works as a clipboard and a mail merge, and goes directly to the Internet.

Smart Tags are also a major new way to control how we work in Office XP. In his demonstration, Eric worked with both the Task Pane and Smart Tags throughout various parts of Office XP, and, he pointed out, Word is now the e-mail editor for Outlook, so that we can take advantage of all the features of Office XP for our communications.

Smart Tags
Smart Tags come preloaded in Office XP. We can choose to use them or ignore them or even develop our own. Other companies are able to furnish their own. UPS, for example, has one we can download which allows us to get tracking numbers and include them in a document or a spreadsheet in Excel. Hovering over the tracking number brings up all the tracking information on the parcel.

Formatting
In making what he calls organizational changes in "reveal formatting," Eric noted that the font, Latin Arial 14-point bold, was available for headers. Changing all headers to this font throughout a 400-page document, for example, would take rather a long time. Now we can select all instances of what we want and make the changes automatically.

Other difficulties arise in formatting documents; in the past, numbering paragraphs, for instance, did not always work the way we needed it to work: auto correct always overrode changes we tried to make. Now, auto correct has a Smart Tag that lets us continue numbering directly in the document.

Autocorrect also always changed things that we did not want changed: 3/4 to superscript, for example, and capitalized certain words. Instead of turning off auto correct in Tools, now, hovering over the item that it changed, an auto Smart Tag appears that allows us to get what we want. Eric emphasized the information that Smart Tags appear just when we need them.

While working on a document, if we type words that the program doesn't recognize, a red, squiggly line appears under it. Generally, it indicates a misspelled word, but it also marks words that are not in the database. As Eric typed Neal's name (whoever he is) a red underline appeared, but then a small, faded blue line appeared denoting that Word now recognized that Neal" is the person's name.

Hovering over the name brought up some other new Smart Tags. In Neal's case, we got a Contents Smart Tag or an Informational Smart Tag. This tag allowed Eric to send Neal an e-mail since it recognized that Neal is in the address book and also allowed Eric to insert his complete address into a document. Previously, we had to go into Outlook and copy each field individually, a tedious process. In addition, the numbers in Neal's address now had the faded blue underline indicating another Smart Tag. This tag took Eric to the Expedia web site and displayed a map showing where Neal lives.

Outlook
Changes have been make in MS Outlook, as well. We do not have to relearn how it works; we can use it much as we did before. But certain features have made some things easier. We can get e-mail from multiple sources without having to be on an Exchange server; we can get e-mail from some of the Web-based hosts. Eric showed how to get some information from an Excel sheet that was in one of his e-mails, somewhere in Outlook, using a search mechanism, selecting multiple areas within a profile. He found the information in an Excel spreadsheet, opened it, and copied what he wanted, pasted it to his document. It didn't fit the rest of the document in format, color, or other aspects.

But then, Smart Tags came to the rescue. A Paste Option Tag appeared that gave him the choices necessary to fit the new information into his document. The paste option automatically matched the imported information to the existing format. This feature saves a lot of time if we bring in material from multiple sources.

Excel
Excel has also benefited from the use of Smart Tags. The investment tag lets us track our stocks and investments. Ticker symbols consist of four letters relating to the company's name (MSFT for Microsoft). An informational tag allows us to find out if the company is still in business, and get quotes directly from MSN Money Central. Eric said that this feature wasn't very compelling, that this kind of information is readily available from lots of sources on the net. However, we can copy stuff from here directly into a spreadsheet and also create a Refreshing Web Query.

We find out that our information comes from an external site, meaning that we do not need to go to a MS site or MSN Money Central, and we can click on Import to copy the information into the spreadsheet. If we remain connected to the Internet with the Refreshable Web Query, our information in the spreadsheet will always be up to date. Eric pointed out, however, that when we want the material refreshed, we have to click on each stock symbol each time. We can't batch all the symbols; we can, though, create multiple links that will be permanent.

Excel has a new feature or two that make it easier for novices. Hovering over an area and clicking on a cell will automatically find out what we want to do. If we have two hundred shares at $15, then the total worth is $3000. It will also reveal the formulas we use and inform us where we have made any errors. Those of us who resist formulas can drag data over an area, hit return, and it should give us the right answer.

Excel has colors now that we can change to suit our moods. Borders are easier to draw anywhere in the spreadsheet, a feature that some people heartily approved.

Scheduling
Scheduling has now been improved in Outlook. Eric said that before he went to work for MS he preferred to have everything in his date book and liked having it on the seat of his car. But now he finds that he has to do things differently as he has to coordinate his schedule with other people, and he can work more efficiently.

The general look of the calendar has not changed, but it now color codes some information. For Important Meetings, with our manager, say, the listing turns red. In setting up meetings, in earlier versions, we had to open our e-mail and accept or decline and then play tag. In the new system, Outlook allows us to respond directly by clicking on one of three possible responses: accept, decline, or tentatively accept. We can propose a new time. Also, now, Exchange servers can find the best time for everyone involved, which also allows us to accept or decline.

PowerPoint
Eric then brought up PowerPoint and wanted to know how many in the audience use PowerPoint. He found that there were quite a few. It seems that not a lot of people use it since too many people have seen too many dry presentations poorly executed. He says, however, that we "will see some really cool things" that we can do. The Task Pane and Smart Tags continue their presence as they do in the other parts of Office XP.

In earlier versions, when we opened the slide sorter, we lost the main screen. Now, the slide sorter view down the left side of the screen is the default upon opening the program. Small tabs allow us to navigate. There are "some very nice templates" available in graphic view, and choosing a new template will change all the slides automatically. However, if someone else wants to combine two separate presentations that have different backgrounds, we need whole new techniques as we could not in the past have multiple masters within a single presentation. There were difficult and time consuming workarounds in jpeg files, for example. Now, we can select different slides and choose a different master for numbers of different slides. This approach is a big benefit, says Eric, for people who bring multiple presentations together as well as for people who want a different look to different parts of their presentation.

And to make a presentation different yet, we can watch video sequences in PowerPoint. Before he got to the demonstration, Eric suggested that MGI's presentation would show us how to make the videos that we can then import to our PowerPoint presentations. In the process of upgrading PowerPoint, MS bought Visio Corporation, a leader in software that makes organizational diagrams and shows how businesses and networks work.

MS incorporated tools from that application in PowerPoint that make it very easy to use video clips. Animations and music are now also possible in these presentations. Logos can be given different types of motion, like entrance effects, growing, and shrinking, and we can draw our own to suit our various desires. For those who want more information about these outstanding features, Eric suggested going to www.microsoft.com/office.

Printing from PowerPoint has often been difficult since we never quite see beforehand how all the slides would come out. It was always tough to stop the printing when it was obvious that things weren't right. In the new version, PowerPoint has a print preview that allows us to see what everything looks like before the actual printing.

Languages
Office XP, in the standard version, has multi-lingual support, reports Eric: languages like Mandarin Chinese, French, German, and, of course, English. MS provides a multi-language support pack that enables these languages to work within "one instance of Office," Eric said. Information is available on the web at www.microsoft.com/office/multi-lingual where the technologies are explained.

Crashing
In regards to programs "having issues," as Eric put it, Microsoft has set up a system that allows people when testing its software to send error reports. Eric reports that the general public can now do the same thing. Also, now, when an application "has an issue," we have a Document Recovery Pane that gives us a choice of the most recent auto saves even though the last is the default. We can also discard all the extra copies so as not to add to the clutter on our hard drives. This feature is common to the other portions of Office XP, as well.

To bring his presentation to a close, Eric mentioned that Office XP had gotten some good reviews, including one from Tom Yeager at InfoWorld. He then mentioned that three versions of Office XP will be available in the stores. These are also listed on MS's web site: the Professional, Special Edition (has Publisher); Professional (lacks Front Page); Standard (lacks Access and Front Page); in addition, a Developer's version is available that has developer's tools for building Web sites and the Smart Tag SDK developer kit. MS's Web site also lists a trial version available for the costs of shipping. Eric said that a Small Business Edition is available but only preinstalled with the purchase of a new computer.

Eric also gave a plug for Microsoft Press, where we can find all sorts of books on XP and other products. Microsoft is giving a 20 percent discount to members of user groups. Use the order code MCSC and, Eric said, "order to your heart's content" and get 20 percent off the order. MS also has another web site, the Mind Share Group, where some software is available for members of users groups. At this site, we can also register to win a Casio Pocket PC.

Questions
In using Smart Tags to import stuff in to a document, how can we control the target formatting?

Eric explained that the system will use the current standards of the target document; but to configure it ourselves, we need to have the developer's kit that allows us to build a custom Smart Tag to do what we want.

In XP does PowerPoint include a true resolve for photographs as if it were from a projector rather than a form of pixelization?

Eric didn't know, but offered to search out the answer after his presentation.

Will the macros written in Excel for Office 2000 work in Office XP?

Macros are simple instruction sets, and as long as they are based in Office 97 or above, they will work. Eric also took this opportunity to explain that documents written in XP can also be read in earlier versions of Office. One might lose some technical macros written in XP, but Eric emphasized that there are viewers available to be downloaded for all MS applications.

In keeping up with MS's upgrade game, how do XP and .Net fit together, and do we need XP to do .Net?

The theory behind .Net is to have software as a service or like having it on my device anytime anywhere. It is incorporated into Office XP as well as Internet collaboration in a component of Front Page and Share Point Services. Later, some .Net services will require XP in order to collaborate on documents through the Internet. These documents need to be compatible with XML, which are created in XP.

Can we still use Outlook as our e-mail editor?

The default editor in XP is Word, but we can still use Outlook by itself. We won't have the Smart Tags and the other advantages that XP provides.

The audience raised the question of registering, activating, installing, and re-installing MS products, and the life cycle of MS products.

If we have a desktop and a laptop, do we have to buy two copies?

Eric explained that the End User Agreement specifies how many times the program can be installed on a machine and on how many machines. Office XP can legally be installed on two machines, and since MS doesn't know that one is a desktop and one is a notebook, it can be installed on each.

Now, what happens when the computer crashes, or we need to reformat the hard drive, and often several times before things go right?

The first time it is loaded, a key is created. [NOTE: The key is based on ID signatures of various hardware components, according to reports. –Ed.] There is some new technology in Office XP, he says, that allows us to reload it multiple times if the hard drive is totally formatted. After several more times, though, he said, we may have to call MS's phone center, which operates 24/7, 365 days a year. He also said that cases like this are pretty rare.

What are MS's plans for the life cycles related to product activation? Will the activation in the User License Agreement always be free, and what happens when the life cycle is 10 or 15 years, and I still want to use the product? Can I still activate it at no charge?

Eric reported that as long as Microsoft exists, it will support activation and registration, and that it can be deactivated, as well. "If something changes with our support process," he said "we can deactivate that process, and it will be perpetual. You can install it on however many machines that you like… We have now begun to limit support for Windows 95, which has existed for six years."