Missing Sonia…

This time of year, my thoughts turn to those who I miss greatly. With the loss of Marc Orchant, it is coming home even more than usual. This year, I thought I would share the story of another MVP who, like Marc, changed my life.

Sonia Coleman was a Microsoft MVP in PowerPoint. She came to PPT late in life. She was retired and was working on some PPT projects. Like many others, she went to the PPT newsgroup for help.  She was looking for help in making her presentations auto-run from a CD. Over time, Sonia not only found the answer to how to do it, but became known for her tutorials and tools that help others create AutoRun CDs.

 The difference with Sonia is that she not only stayed, she made it a point to help everyone she could. When I came to the newsgroup many years ago, she was already one of the most active MVPs there. She was known for wearing RED everywhere. She was a great artist. She loved great food. She knew and lived a good bit of computer history.

Which leads to one of my two favorite memories of Sonia. A group of the Microsoft MVPs went to Mountain View, CA, to visit with the PowerPoint team. While there, we took a tour of the Computer History museum. It was great fun wandering around the museum, seeing all the great historical pieces. But even better was hearing Sonia talk about the pieces in the museum that she had actually worked on.

 My other favorite memory of Sonia is the day that Bruce and I met her at The Stinking Rose Restaurant in San Francisco. Great food, great fun, great conversation- three of the things Sonia loved most.

In fact… Sonia and her auto-run tools were part of the inspiration for my original site. The tutorial I did on her AutoRun program is still up on OnPPT.com. And her templates were part of the inspiration for my original set of template reviews.

Part of Sonia’s site was a series of templates she created to be given away. Yeah, you heard that right.. She created entire sets of templates and just gave them away. That’s the kind of person she was. You can still benefit from this today. Her site, the Digital Studio, is still active on the web. On that site, you will find tutorials, artwork, and all of the template sets.

So… In tribute to Sonia, I recommend you go visit her site. You never know what nuggets you might find there!

Update: As of this time, the template packs and some of the other content appear not to be on the site. I am investigating to find out what happened to them. Meanwhile, the link to the templates has been removed. There is still quite a bit of good content on Sonia’s site. Check it out! 

12/31/07 update: The template links appear to be working again, as you can see in this picture:

WorkingDownloadFromSoniasSite, originally uploaded by call_kathy.

If you try to get to the templates and don’t get an EXE file download box, then try again at a later date.