10 Things I am Most Excited About this Years AU (In no Particular Order)

1. We are back in Las Vegas (Vegas just knows how to put on a good event)
2. Two New Tracks: Business and Project Management (No software training – but I think very relevant to many AU attendees)
3. Two PowerTracks: Civil 3D & Revit (4 days of synchronized, intense learning on two great products)
4. 500 courses/ 300 presenters (Now this requires some juggling)
5. AU Online (Last year we had over 200,000 downloads – and this year we are going to make it even better)
6. My 7^th year working on the BEST EVENT Autodesk puts on
7. Venue (The Venetian has great meeting space AND great guest rooms)
8. Working with many great presenters again – some for the 7^th time
9. Able to pack so much quality content into a 4 day conference
10. AU Connect (New tool and new approach – very cool)

DNA of Course Number

If you have been to AU, or AU Online, you might have noticed that each course has it’s unique course number.  A lot of what I do revolves around those course numbers – and here is how you can read it, using BD24-1L as an example:

1. First two letters are the track (BD= Building Design and Construction, FM = Facilities Mgmt., etc)
2. First numeric: day of week course is (1=Tue, 2=Wed, 3=Thu, 4=Fri)
3. Second numeric: Period in day (1=first period, 4=fourth period ) but not always what time - time can change from day to day.
4. Numeric after dash counts session within this period for the given track.
5. “L” – indicates that session is a hands-on LAB

So, BD24-1L tells me that this is a building course, on Wednesday, later in the day and it is hands-on.

Class Selection Help!

Almost 500 courses and 37 session running at the same time, it can get difficult to make the best of your time. Attached find all of this years courses in an Excel spreadsheet. You can use it to sort and filter to find the classes of most value to you.  How can you use it?  You can sort the document by Track (Building, FM, etc) and then filter by expertise (or whatever).  Use the last column to indicate if your interested in course.  Finally, you can filter by your comment/rating and sort by TC (Time Code) Not perfect – but I hope it helps when you get around to register for AU. (Class info current as of today – this is static and up-to-date info is on the AU website)  If you have any suggestion on how to make this tool better, let me know – or upload it.

Zip: http://www.box.net/public/82gnp4h999
Excel: http://www.box.net/public/ania3rio28