Jonathon Blake wrote:
Chris Bonde wrote:
Is there a heirachial order lister somewhere?
AFAIK, there is not a formally defined hierarchy of material produced
by OOoAuthors.
There are a couple of informal pointers, as correlates to INGOTS levels.
to intermediate to advanced to hey man you fly! order should be set up and
noted in every book.
That sounds like a good idea to me.
At the moment all of the OOoAuthors books (in the English-
language section) are at the same more or less the same level,
though the chapters in each one vary from introductory to more
advanced. That is, there is no hierarchy in the books themselves
The Getting Started book is a bit of different in that it
attempts to introduce OOo's features (both basic features and, in
some cases, more advanced features) and point people to more
detail in the other books.
I don't see the Getting Started book (as it is currently written)
as a "prerequisite" for the other user guides, but that wasn't a
decision but just the way it's evolved. For future editions of
the books, we might look at shortening GS considerably, making it
a prerequisite book, or any number of other variations to improve
the whole set of books being produced.
On that topic... several of us have talked a bit about what we
might do to change the books in the future. For example, we could
produce some guides written at more intermediate and advanced
levels, where we assume people know the basics. This might mean
splitting existing material into introductory and advanced books.
Or the tutorials could replace some of the stuff for beginners,
and the user guides skip some of the beginner stuff and focus on
more intermediate and advanced stuff. Or some other variation...
it's all worth considering as part of a plan for the future.
Right now, of course, we're concentrating on just getting a good,
complete, well-written set of guides done.
In looking to future changes, one thing we must keep in mind is
the distinction between the knowledge level of people about
office suites in general and their knowledge level about OOo in
particular. Many people who are new to OOo are proficient in the
use of one office suite (or at least some of the intermediate and
advanced parts of their chosen program). Other people are new to
office suites in general, or work at only a very basic level in
the one they use now. The needs of these two groups of users are
really quite different, and those different needs are not easy to
meet in a single book (it can be done, quite successfully, but
it's not easy).
Ideally (IMO) we'd have a wide range of materials in different
forms, aimed at different audiences, and I think this sort of
differentiation in information will emerge as the user base of
OOo grows. A lot of info will be in forms other than "user
guides": wikis, faqs, the knowledge base, and other searchable
online forms.
Cheers, Jean
