As content owner for some of the public facing events at Microsoft, I have the great honor to work with very respectful people in our industry, and big names that drive a significant amount of attendance to their sessions at events.
I also have the great honor to review session content, and presentations prior to events, going through hundreds and hundreds of slides.

The quality of those presentations has significantly improved over the past couple of years, but very frequently it's the eye for detail, the final touch of presentation and a solid delivery that make a huge difference in session feedback and scores.

And if there is something that most presenters care about, it is how great their scores are, because if they wouldn't you should wonder what they would be doing in front of the audience anyways.

That's right, this blog might be a little spiced up and salted, maybe a little peppered up too.

In this first part on presentation skills, I wanted to tackle the "Contact Slide", "About Me", "About the Presenter", "Who Ami" slide that some presenters have in their presentations.

And there is a simple set of rules you can maintain when you think about building your presentations:

1. PowerPoint is not a Word Processor, you can actually use graphics or images to bring a better message

2. The audience is typically there for the content, on which you are a subject matter expert

3. A simple contact slide is sufficient, you don't gain ANY credibility by putting in a detailed about me slide

4. A session breakout presentation is not a "market yourself and put in some promo slides" presentation

5. Stick to the basics, sell on knowledge, not on established or want to have established credibility

6. Keep it simple, if the attendee wants to find out more about you, in nowadays social media, he/she definitely will.

Now what would say more than a presentation, built to showcase on what we talk about, when referring to the overly self-centric, promotional, credibility gaining (or losing) "About me slide".

Attached is the slidedeck, also shared on slideshare -http://www.slideshare.net/dandyman72/food-for-thought-21303418

Now don't let this presentation derail or upset you, I gladly have an open discussion on this topic.

I first wanted to highlight, specifically in this post, that I am a Microsoft Employee, not a spokesman for the company, and that this opinion is pure personal and might be different from the vision my employer has.
Now we have that out of the way --- I kind of feel like a "donky" - but hence the lack of a spell checker might actually make me feel more like a "Donkey" - (look up the following Wikipedia article for synonyms - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donkey)

What happened?

A couple of years ago, while I was still trying to find my own identity, I guess you could say so, I signed up for a raffle at an event, that would give you some cool prizes, but also a subscription to Oracle Magazine.
My lower grade teachers would likely unanimously agree that my handwriting was probably not the best one to interpret, but hey, I was using the first forms of digital encryption I guess we can say.

So a while later I started to receive Oracle Magazines, that were addressed to Donky Weyn, and when things moved over to the digital timerame, I started getting my magazine subscription in digital form only.
Here's a screenshot of that:

Now I think it was about a month ago that I was contacted by an agency asking for "Donky".
I responded wisely and asked if this was in regards to my digital magazine subscription that I had not renewed, and of course the answer was "Yes".

So after telling them that my name wasn't Donky, and it must have been some typo, I informed them that I wouldn't trust my information to a company that doesn't seem to care about Data Quality, which sarcasticly enough was a company that builds the majority of their revenue on databases and applications running on top of those.

Despite my decline on the renewal, I still seem to get my magazine subscription.

Now what happened today:

Today I received a letter in the mail, with the opportunity to get a $50 Amazon Gift card, coming from another software company, but addressed to "Donky Weyn".

Needless to say that the company that manages the dataset for Oracle, obviously has sold my data or transferred it to another company, or shared the dataset with them.

Data Quality, Address Validation etc...

When we released Data Quality Services in SQL Server 2012, one of the great features we brought in the release of it was the integration with Windows Azure MarketPlace and the capability of adding data and address validation through services like Melissa Data (http://www.melissadata.com/newsreleases/address-check-windows-azure-marketplace.html).

Even more, in a world where social media, sentiment analytics and Big Data are keywords and valuable assets to businesses, having quality data is key to the success of providing valuable business insights and analytics.

I think I just find myself a great demo on using Data Explorer, or Data Quality Services for one of the next events I'll be presenting at.

Here's some useful links on Data Quality Services, I think I showed you 2 example images on the lack of it already :)

DQS Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dqs/

MSDN Data Quality Services: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff877925.aspx

TechEd Sessions on Data Quality Services:

Using Knowledge to Cleanse Data with Data Quality Services - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DBI207

 Enterprise Information Management (EIM): Bringing Together SSIS, DQS, and MDS - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2012/DBI310 and http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Europe/2012/DBI310

Not that I am going to make a big deal about it ---- after all I don't want to be a "donkey" about it .

Cheers!

The importance of understanding DAX....

The DAX language is the foundation of self-service Business Intelligence using the Microsoft stack. It is the language used to query and program both Microsoft PowerPivot for Excel 2013 and the new SQL Server Analysis Services Tabular model. Learning the basics of DAX is very simple, but mastering it is a different story because it requires a mindset that requires some study, for both BI Professionals and Information Workers.
The syntax of the DAX formulas are very similar to what Excel uses in formulas, however they defer from Excel Formulas that it works with tables and columns, not ranges to let you do sophisticated lookups to related values and related tables.

DAX formulas are highly optimized for in-memory operations, the xVelocity in-memory engine is second to none. Scanning fact tables and performing leaf-level computation happens in a matter of milliseconds. Nevertheless, as with any other language, you can write good DAX or bad DAX, depending on your understanding of the engine internals.

With DAX being used in the BI Semantic Model and PowerPivot and added functionality in SQL Server 2012, DAX is being used as the primary query / expression language in Business Intelligence allowing you to build out data models used for Power View, Data Explorer and Geoflow visualizations.

To highlight the importance and get you up to speed on DAX we are bringing a series of DAX related sessions to TechEd North America and Europe, including an amazing pre-conference presented by DAX / BI Experts Marco Russo and Alberto Ferrari: From 0 to DAX.

Marco and Alberto are top selling authors in the Microsoft BI space and published multiple books: http://www.sqlbi.com/books/.

As Data Platform and Business Intelligence content owner for TechEd North America and TechEd Europe, I am delighted and honored to have these guys on our session agenda.

In their full day pre-conference seminar , you'll have a great opportunity to drill down into every single detail of DAX, starting from zero.
Even if you are not attending TechEd, you can register just for this highly rated and ranked pre-conference seminar.

TechEd North America - Preconferences

TechEd Europe - Preconferences

Additional Learning Resources:

What is DAX - http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/Europe/2012/DBI323

Enriching your BI Semantic Model using DAX: http://channel9.msdn.com/Events/TechEd/NorthAmerica/2011/DBI408