Continuing with our presentation series this week, I am highlighting the work of Slide:ology by Nancy Durante. In today’s discussion, Nancy is joined by Garr Reynolds, author of Presentation Zen.

In this segment, Guy and Nancy discuss the ever elusive question, "How many slide should be in my presentation?"

From Guy:
"People do have a schema for watching visuals, but but not reading lots of text because that’s a different channel. We can look at a quantitative display and listen to someone. That we can do. But that’s very difficult if there’s lots of text."

Author: Laura Rogers, Birmingham, AL
SharePoint 911

In SharePoint, the default behavior of a links list is to open each link in the same browser window.  Sometimes it becomes necessary to create a list of links that, when clicked, will each open up in a new browser window.  Usually this type of functionality is requested when the links are to external web sites, that are outside of the SharePoint environment.  We don’t want users to accidentally navigate away from SharePoint and not know how to get back. 

In this screencast, you will see how to create a data view web part of a list of links that will open in a new browser window.  This functionality is not limited to “Links” lists in SharePoint, and can be utilized any time hyperlinks are being created in any type of data view web parts. 

Towards the end of this screencast, I quickly zip through exporting and importing the web part from one page to another.  To see this process in more detail, please read this previous article of mine Data View Web Part, The Basics – Keep it Clean

Join Laura on October 9 as she presents "Health Care Case Management Solutions in SharePoint". In this three hour, live online, hands-on workshop, you’ll implement a full solution for Health Care Case Management in SharePoint. The scenario used is one to manage a new patient check in at a hospital.

When a new patient arrives in the hospital, there are phases that the patient goes through in their hospital admittance process. In this workshop, you will learn how to create a custom solution for the management of these patients in SharePoint.

Author: Laura Rogers, Birmingham, AL

Laura Rogers is highly visible in the SharePoint community through her contributions on Stump the Panel, regular screencasts and articles on EndUserSharePoint.com, and speaking engagements at SharePoint conferences.

Laura is a regular presenter in the EndUserSharePoint.com live online workshops, including Excel and SharePoint: I didn’t know you could do that!, Health Care Case Management Solutions in SharePoint and Manage Input with Dynamic Feedback Forms in SharePoint

Guest Author: Mark Rackley

Update: A comment was posted asking if Mark had any luck using two date part filters between the "Start" and "End" dates. Mark added an update, at the end of this article, with his solution.

So, I was doing some playing around with mashups in SharePoint.  I was seeing what I could do to create pages a little more useful than you get using vanilla SharePoint without having to crack open Visual Studio.

One of the things I wanted to do was display a SharePoint list on the screen and add a filter to the screen that would allow a user to filter the list with a date field value greater than or equal to whatever a user entered.  Sound�s simple right?  Should be easy? Well, I dropped my SharePoint list on a page, dropped a Date Filter on the page (this is an Enterprise feature by the way), connected the filter to the list and� I simply could not find a way to make the filter work as anything but a �Date equal to� filter.  That�s not really very useful for most real world applications right? 

Well, I reached out to the queen of out-of-the-box web parts Laura Rogers (@WonderLaura) to ask her how to do this, and she had not yet tried.  �Wow� I thought. �Here�s my chance to teach Laura something.�  She also indicated that this is a fairly common question.

Yesterday I talked a little about Nancy Durante and Slide:ology, a paradigm shift in thinking about how to present information. In today’s installment, I’ve chosen one of her quick demo talks on the "Presentation Landscape" diagram she used in the previous video. You can download the document from the original article, Don’t Get Discouraged , Fight for What’s Right!

From Nancy
"If you’ve created a document, call it a document, treat it like it’s a document, distribute it like it’s a document, but don’t stand up in front of your organization and present those things… If it’s a true presentation, the only thing that’s ever put onto the screen is what the audience themselves need to remember."

Watching this video will give you a good context for how to determine the difference between a document and a presentation. You can also see Nancy eat her own dog food as the presentation itself follows her own rules: communicate with storytelling and images, not blocks of text.

Guest Author: Mindaugas Bliudzius

In my last post I showed one way to establish parent � child relations in SharePoint. Sometimes there is a need to pickup default columns values from a related list. For example in my Sales Orders Management application I want to choose Product from a list when creating new a Order or Invoice. But I can’t just have a lookup column to the chosen Product because over time Product prices and names can change. I need to have price and Product name fixed as it was at the time the Order or Invoice was created. So I need to copy price and name values from the chosen Product item to the Order details item.

It is possible to achieve this using just JavaScript (jQuery and SPAPI) and CEWP (Content Editor Web Part). All you need to do is add the CEWP to your page (in my example I added it to the Order view page) and add the following code (see comments inside):

Guest Author: Ayman El-Hattab

This is the second article in a multipart series that is intended to help you create mailing lists for your SharePoint sites or blogs without writing a single line of .NET Code. In the introductory article, I listed the project initiatives, requirements, and objectives. In Part 1, I created a secured backend where we store the subscribers� contacts. In this article, we will continue our journey, let�s carry on!

In the previous article, I made use of the �Contacts� list template, provided out-of-the-box by SharePoint, to create a list which will act as the backend for our mailing list. In this article, I will show you how to configure the �Contact� content type, create a custom subscription form and do some sort of customization. The intention of these customizations is not only to make the subscription form look different from the out-of-the-box list forms but also to show you the power, simplicity, and efficiency of SharePoint Designer 2007.

This week I’m giving a live online Train the Trainer Workshop Series. There are a few resources I speak about during the series, including Nancy Duarte’s theory of presentations as demonstrated in her book Slide:ology.

Creating a presentation that gets participants, especially online participants, emotionally involved is not usually given much through for technical presentations. If you’ve been following my series on developing SharePoint presentation materials, I think you’ll find this 5 minute video interesting as she talks about how her methodolgies apply to scientific and technical presentations.

In the video, Nancy talks about the "Presentation Landscape", thinking about presentations as residing in specific quadrants. Tomorrow, I’ll followup with her discussion of the difference between documents and presentations materials.