Microsoft Office Labs Community Clips

I knew that there were free screencasting tools available, but I did not know about the Microsoft Office Labs Community Clips until I read about it on Channel 10. Community Clips provides a little app that on installing integrates into Office applications. It lets you record a clip or a tutorial in Office and then share it with others online on SoapBox. As the SoapBox service will terminate soon, uploading the WMV file of the screencast is currently disabled.

I hope they bring out a new avatar of SoapBox that uses Silverlight instead of Flash to run the videos while also supporting subtitles.

Update(22-Aug-09): Community Clips works not just for Office applications but also any application that is currently open. Once Community Clips is invoked, it sits in the system tray.


It can be managed with these hot keys -
  • To start recording: Windows key + Alt + R
  • To stop recording: Windows key + Alt + T
  • To pause recording: Windows key + Alt + P
This screencasting tool can also be put to good use for error reporting. It is not uncommon for developers to receive complaints on their application although it has been aggressively tested & found to work great on the developer machine. In addition to programmatic error logging, certain issues arising due to a browser toolbar or other environmental settings on the end-user's computer which are hard to replicate on other computers can be better captured with a video recording using the screencasting tool.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Maven Crash Course - Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes

Image
In the Maven Crash Course " Learn Power Query, Power Pivot & DAX in 15 Minutes ", Chris Dutton walks through a hypothetical business case while showcasing the power of modern Excel tools like Power Query, Power Pivot and DAX. Power Query is used to extract, transform, and load data from external sources like SQL databases, PDF and CSV files. A relational model is created to join the tables without writing a single formula. Exploratory analysis is done using Power Pivot and Data Analysis Expressions (DAX). Data Analysis Expressions is the language that we can use to define new calculated columns and measures to enhance our Data Model instead of the traditional cell formulas that we'd typically use if our data was stored in worksheets. Pivot Charts and slicers are used to design a simple interactive report that the sales managers can use to analyze revenue trends and product performance.
Read more

"Data Prep & Exploratory Data Analysis" course by Maven Analytics

Image
The Maven Analytics course on " Data Prep & Exploratory Data Analysis " by Alice Zhao is a beginner-friendly introduction to machine learning with Python. It covers the key steps of the data science workflow, including: Gathering Data Scoping a Project Modeling Data Sharing Insights Cleaning Data Exploring Data Modeling Data  Sharing Insights The presentation deck which is available as a download crisply summarizes the essential details and is a great reference to keep going back to. The course is well-suited for aspiring data scientists looking to get hands-on experience with the data prep and EDA stages of the machine learning workflow using Python and Jupyter Notebook. 
Read more

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Generative AI Professional Course & Certification Exam (1Z0-1127-24)

Image
I was happy to learn about the Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2024 Generative AI Professional Course with video tutorials and the Certification Exam (1Z0-1127-24) from their newsletter. I found it extremely useful, timely, and relevant. The course, with about 6 hours of videos, provided me with a comprehensive view of what it takes to build a Generative AI application. Although some parts reference OCI services, much of the course remains vendor neutral. Rohit Rahi and his team at Oracle have done a great job of structuring the beginner-friendly yet comprehensive course so well, covering all the essentials across four modules. The curriculum strikes an excellent balance between depth and accessibility.  While Gen AI output is typically non-deterministic, I was surprised to learn that they can be made completely deterministic under certain conditions. Specifically, in the OCI Gen AI service, setting the temperature parameter to 0 produces consistent, deterministic output for a g...
Read more