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Google Docs, the company’s online office suite, now lets people create and use templates. There are many examples already posted in Google’s template gallery, including invoices, resumes, invitations, mileage caluclators and calendars.

Avery Dennison has already posted a number of templates for their self-adhesive labels. Now I have one less reason to use Microsoft Word, and the folks at TastyPopsicle seem to agree with me: see their article called Oh hell no, Google’s got templates!

I’m sure there are security concerns. How hard would it be for someone to post a template that lets users record their web passwords or credit card information, and then sends back that valuable data to the developer? Google’s videos don’t mention any of these issues - instead, users are told that they can email template-based documents to friends, who can fill them out and return the data in their email client. 

Before trying these templates, I suggest changing your Google password to something stronger, like a passphrase, or using a Google account that doesn’t have much or any email or data in it. It’s much easier to set up a fresh Google account than to figure out who’s looking at your data.

There’s more information and a couple of videos in this Google blog article called Templates bring Docs to life.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• 12 May 2008: Software and services - free or paid?
• 24 April 2008: Change that password into a passphrase
• 19 April 2008: Salesforce for Google Apps
• 28 February 2008: The Google cable
• 18 September 2007: Google, Yahoo and IBM in the Office
• 17 April 2008: Virtual keyboards and monitoring software foil keystroke loggers
• 12 April 2008: Finding business contacts and passwords on the Internet
• 19 April 2007: Living la vida Google
• 2 July 2007: CXOs face malware email attacks
• 23 February 2007: Google Apps vs Microsoft Office

From BusinessWeek, here’s an article with 10 tips for delivering effective presentations. this felt like a timely article, as students are starting to deliver presentations in their courses around this time of year.

The author uses Steve Jobs and his product announcements as an example, but many of these tips will work well for any presentation.

My favorite points on the list are:

1) Set the theme. Let the audience know what they will learn from the talk.

4) Use meaningful numbers. Discuss ratios, percentages and results in ways that the audience can understand. Never assume that the audience will do the analysis themselves. I sometimes hear graduate students claim that a company is doing well because it is earning a profit. My follow-up questions focus on their evidence for that claim.

Don’t sweat the small stuff. Product announcements sometimes become awkward when the technology malfunctions. Avoid fancy transitions and tools that take extra preparation, support or time to use.

10) Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse. A presentation is a performance. Most of the audience members have delivered presentations themselves, but they won’t cut the presenter much slack. The best content and slides cannot save a boring or poorly delivered presentation.

Microsoft Office has huge market share – an estimated half a billion users, according to this interview with Microsoft manager Betsy Frost.

But it’s difficult to compete with free applications offered by well established Web software-as-a-service providers. Today, Google announced its web-based slide show application. This wasn’t a surprise. I mentioned Google’s office apps on 19 April and 23 February. These web-based apps don’t have all the features of Microsoft software, and Google doesn’t support third-party plugins. Plugins are software that hooks in to Microsoft Office applications to provide additional features.

When does free beat market share?

But web-based apps do allow users to share documents online, instead of emailing versions of documents. There are security concerns, of course. Google’s applications are tied into the company’s single signon (SSO) authentication system. Google does offer corporate and educational versions of these services, but storage is centralized in Google’s massive data network. Google isn’t offering a database product, but one could argue that the entire Google office suite is really a vast database full of XML-formatted documents and messages. Corporate customers pay Google US$50 per seat each year for the web-based office applications and email. I haven’t seen how Google controls document sharing on academic networks, either.

Web-based office software is becoming a key success factor for the largest Internet search sites. Email, calendar and address book applications are a logical offering. In most industries, companies must use email, but it’s often cheaper to let someone else run the servers. According to the New York Times, Yahoo just purchased Zimbra, a developer of web-based email services. Zimbra’s annual pricing is reasonable: $28 per seat for corporate customers. Universities pay $1 per student account, and $8 per employee account. At those prices, more universities are outsourcing their email systems. I discussed Google’s academic email services on 11 April. Of course, Yahoo is the dominant webmail provider with 181 million unique visitors each month. Google has only 18 million.

The New York Times reported today that IBM will launch its own downloadable version of Sun’s open source office suite. Users still have to install the IBM applications, so the versioning problem still exists.

But IBM is offering its software for free. Oddly enough, IBM resurrected the Lotus Symphony brand for this product. Of course, IBM is offering technical support for corporate users, but not for free.

Wired ran an article a few days ago about pecha kucha, an art-house event that turns PowerPoint on its ear and makes presentations bearable.

The rules are simple:

1. 20 slides per presenter
2. 20 seconds maximum per slide
3. The presenter talks as the slides whiz across the screen.
4. No questions may be asked during the presentation.
5. When the show’s done, the presenter is done.
6. Next presenter, please.

I checked Pecha-Kucha.org to see if there were any events posted for Honolulu. After all, there have been pecha kucha events in over 80 cities around the world since 2003.

No luck.

Pecha kucha in Honolulu?

But this seems like a natural for First Fridays. Pecha kucha was first developed for architects and designers, to keep their pitches reasonable. A typical pecha kucha event has 14 slide shows in a single evening. That’s 280 slides.

There are reports of businesses who use pecha kucha as a presentation format for internal meetings. Perhaps this works better when no one else in the room is using a laptop. This article in the New York Times and this Microsoft web page discuss how Microsoft managers deal with laptops in meetings.

Personal computer use in a meeting can be helpful, but a computer is often a distraction, especially when they’re connected to the Internet. Mobile devices are almost as bad, too.

Now I’m wondering if pecha kucha is a useful tool for teaching. While the format doesn’t leave much time for questions, it does provide a quick pace.

Could pecha kucha help in the classroom?

Over the years, I’ve given student presenters rules that are similar to pecha kucha. I hadn’t made the connection until today, though. One common issue was that students tend to have problem with time limits and slide counts, possibly because this type of presentation format takes some practice to do well.

This format might be very useful for presentations given in online courses, though.

I’m doing a guest lecture tonight in Larry Rowland’s IS 6000 course. My topic is action research, and I’ll discuss several methods that MSIS students can use to complete the professional paper sequence.

Here is a PowerPoint file with annotated slides that I will use during the talk.

Here are a couple of pages from this site during tonight’s talk:

I have a page full of information about writing papers in APA style. It’s listed as “APA style” on the main menu of this site. My example of an annotated bibliography is here, and is also listed under the section about Lesley University.

This page has two relevant sections. One is a discussion of how to write research papers. The other examines the concept of authority in peer-reviewed articles. This page is listed as “References” on the main menu of this site.