Lots of good stuff coming up within the next year!

• Online Help Conference - Europe 2006 will be held 7-8 September 2006 in Manchester, England. Registration is open now for this conference, produced by Matthew Ellison Consulting (in association with WritersUA). Five experts (including me :-) ) will present ten sessions (including the now-famous User Assistance Trends Panel - Hot Tips and Predictions). I'll be presenting Trends in Microsoft Online Help - Preparing for Vista and Choosing a Help Authoring Tool.
• Speaking of WritersUA, Joe Welinske today announced the dates for next year's WritersUA Conference, which will be held at the Hilton San Diego Resort on 25-28 February 2007. Registration opens 1 November 2007.
• STC Region 2 is running Making Cents of Making Sense: Technical Communications and Business from 13-14 October 2006 in London. The conference site needs to be updated with more information, which should be coming soon.
• The TCWorld Conference, organized by tekom and TCeurope, runs from 8-9 November 2006 in Weisbaden, Germany. tekom will host the first OASIS Open Standards Day in Germany at the same time.

Hope to see you!

However did I miss this?

SnagIt now lets you save images as PDF files. Take a screenshot. Print a report. Grab a Web page. And then click Save As and select PDF.

I always have the latest version of SnagIt (and Camtasia). And, if anyone had asked, I would have said that I know what the latest features are that TechSmith added, because of course I read the "what's new" pages.

But somehow I missed this, finding it by accident this weekend. My ever-diligent system administrator (also known as my husband Jim ;-) ) set me up with a new dual core machine last week, but I haven't installed Acrobat yet. So when I wanted to save a report this weekend, I figured I could at least grab a screenshot so I had a record of it.

So I was a bit surprised when SnagIt selected PDF as the file type. Pleasantly so :-)

Sweet :-)

Remembering Josef Becker (4 July 1950 - 29 March 2006)

The Microsoft Help MVPs have learned that Josef Becker died suddenly on 29 March 2006. Josef was well known in the Help authoring world for his collection of Help utilities, now found online at http://www.helpmaster.info. Many Help authors have referred to his site over the years, as Josef linked to many utilities that couldn't be found anywhere else.

Josef wrote his first technical documentation in 1982. Ten years later, he developed his first WinHelp system using pure Word. He was a Microsoft Help MVP from 1999 to 2005.

In later years, Josef was the Managing Director of Becker & Poettgen Software GmbH, a firm that specializes in developing computer-based training, Web-based training, and hypertext-based training. The firm continues under the direction of his daughter, Anne.

The Microsoft Help MVPs extend our deepest sympathies to his family.