Hello!!!
I hope you're all loving the sunshine and glorious warmth!
I definitely enjoyed it yesterday whilst attending the London Paddington version of the D365PPUG event at the Microsoft office. I was lucky enough to be picked to do my talk on PowerPoint for Power Apps - tips and tricks!
Me...talking whilst at a Microsoft office... it was awesome! And now I can relax a bit.
I know I usually do an extensive write-up about the events I go to, however, this one will be slightly shorter than normal. I was very nervous about my talk yesterday. It is the second time I've ever done an in-person talk and I'm still getting to grips with doing them and feeling confident with them. I ended up doodling on my tablet to calm myself during the keynote session, this consequently prevented me from making as many notes as I usually do, but really helped me feel at ease and I loved the stuff that was happening. So I continued throughout the day...
I added keywords and phrases from the sessions around the doodle and hopefully, this will help people to start looking things up online at least. But mostly, I hope it gives a nice fun feel for the day. I nearly forgot to add myself into the image! I was definitely at that session, so it had to go in!
I may consider doing these at other events. Especially the ones where I'm feeling a little anxiety about my session.
My session was originally at 11.45am but there was an error with the original agenda and it was now at 10.45am! Eeek!
The session did go so much better than I could have hoped though. At first, the room was bare and I was desperately hoping this wasn't it. But then the team rounded up the people waiting outside the door and they started to pour in. Thank you so much to Areti Iles and Feridun Kadir for supporting me during. It wasn't a full room but that didn't matter, I was beaming about the amount of people that had come to listen to me. I introduced myself about 3 times with a stop and start situation but then I got going and started to talk through my slides. I purposefully chose to not have any notes, except for what I had on the slides themselves because I wanted to be myself and to guide the audience through the slide as it was with the visuals. People were nodding, smiling, laughing, taking pictures of the slides, and writing notes and it was glorious to see. After, there were several questions which was fantastic and there was definitely excitement at the concept of knowing more about PowerPoint from online tutorials I will be starting very soon.
After the session, I sat down to take a beat and a guy called Ahmed approached me and said that he really enjoyed my session. He said that it "blew his mind" to find out what PowerPoint could do and that honestly made my whole day. Poor guy was then bombarded with a hug and selfie by me but after being so nervous, I could not have appreciated it more.
Then I was told by several others that they had heard good things about the session. I just thought, JOB DONE THEN!
The other sessions I went to were:
Andrew Bibby - Keynotes
Mark Oburoh and Ana Demeny - Microsoft road map for Dynamics 365 and Power Platform
Areti Iles - Making the most out of Customer Voice
Julian Sharp - Microsoft Dataverse and Power BI
Chris Huntingford - The importance of Data Driven Solution Design
Ana Demeny and Andrew Welch - (enterprise) Architecting an Ecosystem: real-World Examples and Best Practices from the Industry
All the talks were very insightful and really engaging. I feel like I learn not just about the content of the presentations at these events, but also some tips on how to present well.
The talks regarding the road map and idea of data driven solution design were sessions that really resonated with me. I don't know if I felt more at ease about AI from the road map session, but I did think some of the new features were cool. And I especially like a particular diagram that Chris showed re User + Data Driven Solution Design.
I met a bunch of new faces and enjoyed seeing some of my friends again. We went out for a few drinks after the event (mine being rose lemonade, as I don't drink) and after Ewan leant me his battery pack to charge my phone a bit, (thanks Ewan! Life saver) I was then off home.
As some people may have gathered now, I like to get to these things early so I don't have a stressful journey. I left the house at 5am and got to the site at 7am-ish, had some food and chilled out in the sun for a while. The event started at half 8 and I got home at 8pm, long old day, but worth it.
I would definitely recommend this event to anyone interested in networking, learning, seeing how passionate others are (in-person) about what they do, and enjoying the opportunity to be at a Microsoft site.
So that's it from me on that!
I hope you liked it and keep your eyes open for more overviews of events to come!
Thanks everyone!
P.S I want to say a big thanks to EY Kalman. I was wobbly about speaking and it was nice to know that someone was checking in with me throughout the event. So...FANX!