Benjamin Horst wrote:
I was doing some research for a Drupal project recently, and found a
Google Knol with useful information on the topic [...]
This got me thinking OOo might receive extra publicity by putting
various OpenOffice tutorials onto Google Knol as an additional
publication channel. Perhaps some of the Authors project information
could be uploaded in bite-sized chunks, and the articles would, of
course, point back to the project's homepage.
[...]
Do you all think it would be worth the time and effort, or are our
online resources already sufficiently visible to web searchers with our
wiki and other channels?
Ben,
In general I think that the more places where we can make info about OOo
available, the better, especially if the info covers topics (and has
keywords) that might reach people who haven't heard of OOo yet, or
haven't seriously considered trying it out, or think it can't/won't do
what they want when in fact it does.
Comments on the [users] list often demonstrate that people don't find
the info they need about OOo because they don't know what to search for,
or sometimes that the possibility of doing "x" even exists. Often they
are familiar with MSO and its terminology, but can't find the equivalent
in OOo. I have a friend who keeps complaining to me that "OOo can't do
X" when what he really means is "I can't figure out how to do X using
OOo" or "OOo doesn't do X the way I'm used to doing in MSO and the only
way I've found in OOo is cumbersome" (having missed the straightforward
way because he hasn't made the paradigm shift yet).
Lastly, although there are a lot of online resources available on the
wiki and other channels, IMO there are not enough tutorials showing how
to do specific tasks, both common and more advanced.
So... in general I'd say yes it would be worth the time and effort, if
someone has the time and interest. Most of the user guides are quite
modular, so reusing chunks of them (perhaps modified a bit) shouldn't be
too difficult, just time-consuming. I also suggest that any new
tutorials be put on the OOo wiki as well as wherever else they go.
For me the priority of such efforts is well below the priority of
keeping the user guides up to date with new releases of the software,
and writing the missing chapters of existing user guides... which is why
I'm not already creating tutorials or how-to's by reusing what we've got.
--Jean
