Minutes of the October Meeting

By James Weber, Secretary, Tampa PC Users Group
jlweber9@mindspring.com

Our meeting started at 6:30. Elections are coming up soon and a call for nominees was put to the group. Microsoft held their Windows XP Event at the AMC Veterans Theater on October 20, 2001. Our president, Mary Sheridan, was able to get about ten people present to volunteer.

We also had Mr. Revis Bland from New Horizons learning center (http://www.newhorizons-tpa.com) present a catalogue of classes available in the Tampa and Clearwater areas.

Our main presentation started at 7:05. Mr. Kyle Brodie of Executrain (http://www.executrain.com) demonstrated some of the new features of the Office XP suite. The biggest new feature of all XP programs is a "task window". This is a separate window containing a list of the most commonly used functions within the particular program. The menus and windows can also be customized easier than previous versions of Office.

Office XP now recognizes print from writing tablets and offers voice recognition and text to speech. Excel XP added color to the tabs at the bottom of the open tables, rows and columns are now highlighted, and the auto sum function has been enhanced. Power Point XP has added new templates and outlines of slides, and the actual slides are more visible to ease use and development of a presentation. Access XP databases are more readily transferred to other XP programs. Front Page XP added a drawing tool bar to enhance creating your own web content.

There were a large number of T-shirts given away, as well as three trial versions of Office XP. The meeting ended at 8:05. u