Mostly for fun and experience, I've been filming a documentary about a community of Scottish Gaelic learners for about the past year. There's one other person fully involved, and a few others from the community who are sort of advising and giving us some archive footage.

We're going to keep filming through New Year's Day, but we put together a trailer to show what we're doing. Even if you're not that interested in Scottish Gaelic, you might find it interesting -- it's mostly about the people and their passion for this culture.

A very short recap at the beginning of this one. I didn't try to recap the entire story from both previous episodes because it isn't important for understanding this quick tip, and I didn't want the introduction to go on too long. Each of the episodes stands on its own as far as delivering a complete tip, but it's obvious that they are related--if you're developing a Word add-in, you might want to watch the whole Word add-in series to pick up general ideas.

I also introduced a change of scenery and an archetypal character to help deepen the narrative. They could become involved in sub-plots in future episodes, which would introduce fresh motivations and perhaps increase the importance of the solutions.

Video: Word Add-ins Part 3: Searching for Text and Adding a Comment

I put a short summary at the beginning of this episode to remind people of what happened (the plan was to publish one episode per week), and also to tap into the established conventions of TV shows that have a continuing story line. The recap tends to highten anticipation for me, and puts me in a receptive frame of mind. In these short quick tip videos, it kind of does the same thing, but also it's making fun of the convention, like an in-joke.

Video: Word Add-ins Part 2: When Add-ins Collide

I thought it would save time to shoot three episodes all at the same time, and take advantage of having the camera set up and the story ready to go. Shooting three at one session did save time, but it took longer to find three related quick tips and write a story that wove them together.

I think there is a benefit as far as viewer engagement, though--don't you want to find out what happens at the end? :-)

Video: Word Add-ins Part 1: Clear the Ribbon Except for My Controls

This video is really all about code. There aren't any UI gestures native to the subject of the quick tip; all the work is done by the code at run time. But the reason I made this is that I've always had trouble figuring out the objects for menus, and how to use them.

So the challenge was to set up the situation so people would realize that they shouldn't pay too much attention to the names of the objects, and then show them the code.

Video: Create an Excel Shortcut Menu That Writes Selections to Text

This video is about something a lot of people would like to do, but it's not enabled. Like this guy, people can waste a lot of time before they find out they can't do it, so part of good communication is letting them know about it.

Video: Activate a Custom Ribbon Tab When a Document Is Opened

The last video was very basic and I put it together pretty quickly. For this one, I got a story idea that I thought was just bizarre enough that I had to do it. It's also a lot of fun to play around with the green screen and do some animation.

Plus, the quick tip itself is very easy and takes only a few seconds to show, so I had some extra time to devote to the story without making the video too long -- it's still just a minute and a half.

Video: Automatic project migration

Experimenting with getting away from the newscast-style delivery. I'd like to make more of a story, but without so much setup that people who really just want information are annoyed by the extra business. Plus there's the problem that no one else in my work group is really able to help with the acting consistently, so if I write a script that needs a few people and everyone's busy, I'm stuck. So I need a way to have a story without relying on other people to help out.

My solution this week is to go with the video blog format and drop the viewer into my diary of a (tech-support) story. I deliberately made it grainy and low-res like a typical Web cam, but it might be too low to inspire people to stay with it; I don't know. I notice that productions that use the video blog style usually still look like they're shot in a studio, with flattering lighting and a high-definition picture. That's not too realistic for something that's supposed to be a Web cam video made by a developer in his office. Does it matter?

Video: Removing a Customization Before E-Mailing a Document

On this dev tip video, I added some 3D effects, well, just for fun and to add interest really. This is an example of a video that could work fine just as audio -- the visuals add some context and might help you remember the information better, but they don't convey much information by themselves.

For developer content, the kind of visual that adds information is code (so you can see the whole method or even class at once), and tasks that use tools in the Visual Studio UI (such as wizards, the Toolbox, and UI design for the application). The message in this video is mostly "make sure you install the right version of the runtime."

Video: Assembly Cannot Be Found

My variety-show style videos weren't getting many views. I don't know whether people didn't know about them, or whether the programmer audience just isn't interested in variety shows about Office programming. :-P Also, no one was leaving me any feedback about the show so I didn't know how to improve it.

My coworkers suggested that I just make one segment per video, instead of a larger show. That way, the show title can reflect the exact contents, which will make it easier to find in searches. Also, the videos will be even shorter. This first one is 51 seconds long.

Since I don't have a series title any more but I still want to do something to make the background interesting, I'm experimenting with a little picture-in-picture of the forum where get my tips. Still not too interesting--I think it looks good, but I'll have to put some more time into choosing the right images.

Video: Preventing Save in Word 2007