Jean To be honest, I'm in agreement with Florian. On the whole I've only used the help file twice since signing up as I don't find it helpful. I think in places it's too descriptive rather than giving users concise instructions about how to do what they want and I ended up reverting to a mixture of the pdfs, wiki and figuring it out for myself. I'm sure there's things I've missed as I tend to try and have a bit of knowledge about everything, rather than concentrating on one thing, which is probably where I fall down. I did have a crack at updating the Getting Started Guide (chs 1-8) on the Wiki a few weeks ago and spent a few days working on it solidly, actually testing the existing instructions to find out whether anything had changed and updating them accordingly, including screen captures, but I agree that it probably needs looking at again after the Base documentation is complete by an expert.
Maybe Florian could look at that and give us feedback, as he is probably a more frequent user of Base than me. I do think that some things for Base and Calc which are written with novices/intermediate users, actually expect the user to have had previous experience with similar applications, which might not be the case. I mean just to give you a good example, there's a crisis in the UK at the moment because job centres (which are run by the Government) are great for catering for what I would call the "true" working class (and I hope I don't offend anyone by using that term) but aren't equipped for helping middle managers, IT workers and those from a middle class background. Instead you have to rely on agencies and they're not best equipped for helping to cross-train people in the current economic climate. Someone somewhere in this country will make a mint I'm sure by helping them. Anyway, I'm unemployed at the moment and I went into my local job centre last month as usual to sign on and had to declare that I'd signed up for this project as a way of updating my skills and my portfolio. Even though the UK Government has made a commitment to some opensource applications, the people in the job centre, who are government workers, not only didn't know what open source was, which took me aback, but they'd never heard of OOo, so I had to explain what it was and that it was an alternative to MS Office Suite. The person I was talking to had hardly used MS Office, nevermind any other application, so I suggested to him to have a look in his spare time and gave him the OOo address. On a slightly lighter note, which you might find hillarious - I certainly did and I'm sure anyone else in the UK would find it equally funny. They wanted me to get a form signed by OOo to say that I was a volunteer. (You have to declare that you're working voluntarily and not getting paid so that it doesn't affect your benefits while you're searching for work.) I had to explain that it couldn't be done because the person that would need to sign it was probably on the other side of the world! It served to show that systems in this country need to be dragged into the 21st century and account for people using the internet. Regards Claire Regards Claire On 2 March 2010 05:57, Jean Hollis Weber <jeanwe...@gmail.com> wrote: > Claire Wood wrote: > >> I think initially when you first start using OOo you're better referring >> to >> the PDF documents or the Wiki rather than the help file as they're more up >> to date. >> > > The problem is that there is little user-oriented documentation on Base. > Getting Started with Base is very good and is the best place to start, but > most people don't discover its existence. > > > I know that the Base documentation is currently being updated. >> > > "Being updated" is over-stating the case. The Base Guide is being written, > and most of it isn't even in an early draft state yet. > > And I don't think it's fair to say that the user docs -- especially those > on the wiki -- are "more up to date" than the help file. > > --Jean > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@documentation.openoffice.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@documentation.openoffice.org > > -- Best wishes Claire Wood
