Exciting PASS Topics

Here I am, sitting on a plane, returning from Seattle from PASS. It's been a good conference, and there a bunch of things that I'm excited about. There are many technologies that I work with day to day, and I would like to start blogging a bit more about what I'm learning as I assimilate these new things. PASS is a great conference for motivation for me. I have an opportunity to learn about so many technologies dealing with Data and Analysis. So, without further ado, here are the topics I'm most excited about from PASS, and from my watching and playing with tools I've seen from the conference.

• Word 2007
  
  • One of the first things I should mention is that I'm actually composing this post at roughly 35,000 feet, on my way back to Madison. I'm really excited about the blogging capabilities in Word. So far, I've been highly impressed.
    
• Outlook 2007
  
  • RSS FEEDS! This looks to be really really nice… I'm hoping I will be able to get the same sort of functionality that I do with Google Reader currently. I hope that these RSS feeds will eventually sync to my smartphone and PocketPC phones.
    
  • I love the new views, but I'll need to play for a while to fully understand what's there.
    
• Excel 2007
  
  • I can hardly say anything but WOW!!!! I'm utterly blown away by all of the features here. There are way too many to list in this post. For some reason, I haven't embraced excel as I probably should have in the past. I'm a data guy, and I should probably be a highly advanced Excel user, but I'm not. I think the new interface will bring me much further towards my goal of becoming one.
    
• PowerPoint 2007
  
  • Wowza. I spend a ton of time in PowerPoint (lucky, most are created by others) in the classes that I teach. I'm starting to believe that I could actually go out and build a compelling slideshow without having to steal from other good presentations.
    
• Data Mining Addins for Office 2007
  
  • We're finally bringing data mining to the masses. I remember having my jaw hang slack as I watched some of the demos that happened at PASS around this tool. I can't wait until the RTM bits start to filter their way out to the web
    

There is a ton more for me to sit and play with. I need to get a comprehensive list of what I'd like to do out there, partially as motivation to myself, but also as motivation to others to keep pestering me until I get this blog running the way that I want it to. It's really odd for me to be writing a blog entry at 35,000 feet, but I think Office 2007 makes this possible for me.

Best Regards,

/Gentry