I&ve come to loathe PowerPoint over the years. I once was a competitive speaker and watching people use this product & and the bad habits I&ve developed using it & has been like fingernails on a chalkboard. It has historically been a tool that promoted stupid things, like creating audience-abuse slides that no one could read and presentations where the presenter read the slide to the audience. People, and I include myself, found it so easy to build presentations they&d wait until the last minute and then get in front of an audience with little or no rehearsal or preparation, resulting in substandard performance.

But last month, Microsoft unveiled a whole bunch of enhancements, features, and improvements for Office 365, now called Microsoft 365. If you blinked, you may have missed something named Presenter Coach, which could turn PowerPoint into a tool that ensures presentation quality. These features will roll out over the next several weeks; I can hardly wait.

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The COVID-19 pandemic has postponed the Tokyo Olympics, scrubbed all college sports and silenced presidential campaign rallies, so it shouldn't be any surprise that the crisis has also upended plans Microsoft once had set in similar stone.

But because of the work-at-home mandate set by many businesses, Microsoft has faced other pressures by dint of its place as the maker of Windows and Office, two technology cornerstones of modern corporations.

Along with rivals Google and Apple, Microsoft was among the first U.S. firms to send employees home, one of the first to start tearing up calendars. Since early March, it's made a score and more changes to product timelines, launched deals specific to work-at-home or the pandemic, and taken action to shutter stores and symposiums.

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This pilot fish maintains user accounts for about 1,400 employees of a county government, and hea bit nonplussed when he gets this trouble ticket:

Description: Recently added employee (intern) first name is misspelled. Should be Lesley instead of Leslie (see journal entry). Please fix her GroupWise and Active Directory accounts to reflect correct spelling of her name.

&In order for this ticket to find its way to me, it had to be (1) created by the original requester and submitted, (2) triaged and assigned to the network group by the help desk admin and (3) assigned directly to me by my team lead,& says fish.

&Apparently, it never occurred to any of the people who helped this ticket along that neither ‘Leslie& nor ‘Lesley& was enough information to uniquely identify the account in question.

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