PowerPoint Newsgroup

by Geetesh Bajaj

...Continued from Page 1

When Did It Start
A Day In The Life Of...
Etiquette
Using A NewsReader
Reading From A Browser
A Note From Sonia

When Did It Start

According to information available from the PressPass section of the Microsoft site, the newsgroups were started as a replacement to Microsoft's erstwhile CompuServe® forums. This announcement was made on April 9, 1996 - the newsgroups actually went live on the 15th; the CompuServe® forums ceased to exist after the 20th. Everything happened within a span of 12 days!

You can read the press release in its entirety at:

Microsoft Announces Newsgroups

Back

A Day In The Life Of...

Compared to other newsgroups on the Internet, the PowerPoint group is like a haven. Around 124,000 (as on December 5th, 2003) messages and replies have made their appearance on this newsgroup. Yet, postings normally do not exceed an average of more than 300 a day - and many answers are provided by a few volunteers, many of them are MVPs (Microsoft Valued Professionals). You can learn more about the MVP program from:

mvps.org

At least two of the MVPs helping you on the forum are active since the CompuServe® days. It's not only the MVPs who help resolve your problems - participants include book authors, presentation professionals, site owners, programmers and ordinary users too.

It's worth mentioning here that all those who choose to help you and provide you with answers are under absolutely no obligation to do so. They receive no monetary compensation from Microsoft. Indeed, many of them started of as PowerPoint beginners.

Back

Etiquette

Microsoft maintains a charter which details ther rules of conduct for using Microsoft newsgroups. You'll find this document at:

Newsgroup Rules

Back

Using A NewsReader

In most cases, you may want to use a news reader application to read and store news postings. Examples of these applications include Outlook Express, Forte Agent, Netscape News and Super Gravity.

Instructions to configure such news readers can be found in the accompanying help files. The following links are excellent sources for more information:

NewsReaders.com is a great resource about newsgroups and software related to them.

The Tomsterdam site has links to various Outlook Express resources.

The Unofficial Agent and Free Agent FAQ is a great source for Free Agent and Agent tips.

The Unofficial Netscape FAQ is a great place to learn more about Netscape News.

NewZilla is an unofficial Netscape 6 and Mozilla FAQ resource.

A Quickstart Guide is available for Gravity on the MicroPlanet site.

Tom's Gravity Pages is an excellent resource and introduction to users of MicroPlanet Gravity.

Back

Reading From A Browser

Microsoft has a browser interface URL from where you can access all newsgroups, including those concerned with PowerPoint:

Microsoft Newsgroups

Google Groups archives postings from various newsgroups - these are available for search at:

Google Groups

Back

A Note From Sonia

Since I created this page, I read a excellent related posting by Sonia Coleman on the PowerPoint newsgroup. It is reproduced here with her permission. Thank you Sonia.

First of all, visit the PowerPoint FAQ's page at

http://www.rdpslides.com/pptfaq/

Save it to your "Favourites" or "Bookmarks", because you'll want to revisit it repeatedly. On that first visit, though, do read the "Important Stuff". It got it's name because it's vitally important and will save you lots of heartaches!

There are usually about 10,000 messages and replies posted and viewable on this newsgroup. If you are not directly accessing the msnews.microsoft.com news server, we encourage you to do so. Or you can click on the following address and your news reader should set up the account for you:

news://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.powerpoint

Once you have done that, you will need to read in the headers for the existing posts. It's hard to tell you how to do that in your particular news reader, but if you are using Outlook Express you can go to Tools > Options Read and set News > Get Next headers to the number of headers to be read (your choice). Set the number from 300 to 1,000 (or uncheck the box and all headers will be downloaded to you.)

Then go to Tools > Get Next XXX headers and click it. (XXX= the number you set above.) Keep doing this until you have as many headers as you want on your system. Or, if you unclick the box, the total number of available messages (10,000) will be downloaded. If you are on dial-up or an expensive connection, this might not be a suitable option for you.

In Outlook Express, you can use the "Edit > Find" facility to search for a keyword, a poster's name, etc. This is very helpful if you have a specific question and you want to see if someone else has asked a similar question and received some assistance that you too can benefit from.

In Netscape, the following will work. Settings: Edit > Preferences > Newsgroup Servers & Edit > Preferences Disk Space to set download and storage options. Right click on a newsgroup, Select NewsGroup Properties and set some more.

Search: Edit > Search Messages, use drop down lists to set parameters and type in the search string.

The key here is that tons of information exchange is stored on the msnews.microsoft.com news server, and this will help you take full advantage of that fact.

If you have a question, please post it. Include the version of PowerPoint that you are using and the version of Windows that you are running. Also include any additional details related to the problem and the processes that you used to get there. This stuff is really important and will help us respond with the most useful suggestions.

We hope that this will help you gain the maximum benefit from our little newsgroup. We warmly welcome you and hope that you will take full advantage of the information posted here, and also contribute your knowledge to other posters who are struggling with something you have already figured out and resolved. The water is warm and friendly, so just dive right in and have fun with us.

By the way, if anyone has a news reader not mentioned, please jump in and describe the set-up and "find/search" process for that news reader. I'll add the information to this message for the future.

Sonia Coleman
MS Power Point MVP Team
http://www.soniacoleman.com