Microsoft, Facebook and Fixing Things That Aren’t Broken

We recently upgraded all of our computers to Office 2013. The biggest problem we have run into so far is with Powerpoint. Older versions of Powerpoint had something called “Presenter View” where you could see what slides were coming up, click on any of them and get their quickly. Well, Microsoft just ruined it all. The new Powerpoint has something by the same name, but that function has been stripped out. Now you have to click a button mid-presentation to see all the slides, click on the one you want, and it will go there. That is an eternity when people are left gazing at the wrong song or wrong verse on the screen. It really made me wonder if the guys put in charge of updating powerpoint had ever actually used powerpoint in front of real people before. If you haven’t experienced an encounter with meaningless change with Microsoft products you have undoubtedly experienced this with Facebook.

Sometimes in congregational life, things get changed for the sake of change. There isn’t necessarily a rhyme or reason for it, we just thought it might be nice to snazz something up a bit or maybe the change occurred because no one was paying attention and it just happened. Change is healthy. Change is necessary. But change needs to get us closer to the win, not further from it. What is more, a change can be great and needed but poorly communicated. When that happens, what would have and could have been a tremendous win gets tossed out by people who weren’t ready for the adjustment. That’s just poor leadership.

It is imperative that we lead people through change. It is equally imperative that we adequately assess why we do the things we do and whether or not it is biblical and functional. Change can be exciting but we don’t change for excitement’s sake. We change because we think we can do a better job embracing and accomplishing the mission God has given us in Christ.

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Dear Microsoft Word…Please Add This Feature

Dear Microsoft Word Developers,

I use Word just about every day. There are many times I am typing something and decide a part of the text needs to be made into a document of its own. It would be great if you could select the text, right click it or have a menu option under edit (with keyboard shortcut) to make the selected text into a new document! You could quickly name the document and have it cut or copy that text into a new document. That would save me so much time. Thanks for listening.

Regards,

Matt

Can anyone give me an “amen”? Can I get a witness up in here?

How to Add Multiple Pictures from a Folder Directly Into Powerpoint

I needed to make a powerpoint of 100 pictures and figured there had to be a way to do this quickly. In Powerpoint 2007 all you have to do is click “Insert” and then click “Photo Album”. You can then choose the directory, select all the pictures you want (Ctrl+A will do this quickly) and then click to create the powerpoint. This creates one slide per picture and even resizes your pictures for you. This saved me close to an hour of creating slides and inserting pictures one by one. You can do this in older versions but you have to download a plugin to get it to work.

You Might Not Want to Install Internet Explorer 8

I hadn’t rebooted my computer in a few days so I did this morning. I was met with the following error message:

Winnt_root>\System32\Hal.dll missing or corrupt:
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

After some investigation I came across this link that told me exactly what the problem was.

I had recently updated to IE 8 and it corrupted the boot.ini file that in turn wasn’t properly locating hal.dll. Long story short, I had to reinstall windows and now I don’t have internet, network access, network printers, any of my programs ranging from Microsoft Office to Firefox and a host of other problems. This is going to take countless hours for me to fix. I was very worried that I had lost 15+ gigs of data including sermon mp3s and all of the files from church that are necessary to run several ministries and classes. I salvaged that but I am basically forced to starting over from a blank slate on my work computer.

I highly recommend not updating to IE 8. What is even crazier is it auto updated and I don’t even use IE. I use firefox. So my computer crashed over a Microsoft program I don’t even use. Thanks Microsoft!

Mac vs Pc Spoof We Did For Connect

Here is a video Joel and I did to plug our upcoming involvement event – Connect. Joel did a great job putting this together!