Florida Association of Computer User Groups Meeting in Orlando

By Don Patzsch, Tampa PC Users Group

At the FACUG meeting in Orlando on March 13, the first vendor was Adobe. They gave each person present a shrink wrapped copy of PageMill version 3.0. The girl who demonstrated PageMill ver 3.0 and PhotoDeluxe really did a beautiful job. She had her talk down perfectly, with no hems or haws and she knew how to use her computer to advantage in showing us these programs. I give her an A+, and the programs are A+ also. Another thing regarding Adobe. They have a Reader on their Internet site which is free. You should look at it. A copy was given to us. (This is not Adobe Acrobat, that's another program.)

Saturday morning JASC software told us about their Paint Shop Pro 5 and other software on their web site. Some of the software is shareware. Paint Shop Pro 5 is their easy-to-use graphics editor. It features complete layer support, picture tube brushes, CMYK separations, and pressure sensitive tablet support. The demo was very good. I ordered a copy for my own personal use. It is about $50. http://www.jasc.com .

Then there were sessions on making money for your group, publicity and public relations, and user group newsletters. Following that, sessions on user group home pages, SIGs, and using volunteers. In each session, you learned from the folks from all the groups. It would be difficult to place all the notes we took in this short review of the meetings.

Saturday noon, Alps Electric presented a talk on their new printer.

Then a session with all the vendors up at the front of the room so we could pester them with silly questions and requests of all kinds. This is where you meet all the vendors and you get to ask them how to get them to come to your meetings and what they want from you.

At 6 P.M., Microsoft representatives gave us a talk on some of their products.

About 9:30 P.M. Micrografx gave us a talk on some of their products. This girl was very good, she kept the demo down to earth. They sell Webtricity, which gives you easy animations and 3D graphics. Great! Also, Windows Draw 6, a general purpose drawing, diagramming, and publishing program. You can output HTML without knowing any code. Micrographx gave us all a CD ROM of Picture Publisher.

Sunday morning, there were group sessions on running a user group, building membership, and obtaining grants.

We attended Joan Dineen's session on how to obtain grants. She does a great job of telling us how their Women's PC User Group received a grant of $10,000 cash for them to buy an InFocus Projector for their group. Several members present told how they obtained grants, some for large sums of money. This is always a very interesting session. I recall about three or four years back, Roger Meissner of the Sun City Center group chaired this group session and told us how they received their grant of $10,000 to buy a projector for their group. They got their money in three batches of $3,333 each year for three years. Sun City Center has probably been the most active in applications and receipt of grant monies. Since Roger Meissner's session, for the last two or three years or so Joan Dineen has chaired this panel discussion. By the way, the Tampa Bay Computer Society has applied for a grant to give their group a projector also.

Following this session, were others: The Internet as a User Group Facility, New Member Orientation, and Meeting Presentations and Programs.

Cybermedia was to present the talk and demo at Sunday's noon session. The presenter was ill and could not make it, so Gene Barlow talked about PowerQuest's programs, Partition Magic, Drive Copy, and the New Drive Image, version 2.0. Gene has been at most of the sessions since it started in maybe 1989. I don't remember when Gary Schweinshaupt started this gathering of the User Groups, but it was about eight years ago. I have attended all the meetings each year except one in the Space Coast group's area a year or two ago.

Also to share the lunch time, we were given a talk on Real Help, and other programs by Quarterdeck. At the end of his talk, we were each given a copy of RealHelp.

After lunch on Sunday the vendors set up displays of their products and we all walked around to see and talk for an hour or two. Corel gave us a CD ROM of CorelDraw 8. It is good for only 30 days but will give us time to look it over. Lotus gave out a copy of SmartSuite 97 on CD ROM. Then, many prizes were given away by calling our ticket numbers out. Everyone got at least one prize, some were very expensive shrink wrapped software. Then back to the car to drive home. u