On Monday February 05 2007 9:47 am, William Case wrote:
> Hi;
>
> I just spent most of Sunday building two sets of permanent
> 'Styles'.
>
> Although I have been using OOo Write and Calc for over two years
> and do not consider myself a newbie, it was one of the most
> frustrating exercises I have had using a computer in a long time.
> I tried to follow both the online 'Help' instructions and the
> downloaded documented Manual.
>
> The problems were mainly with the written word -- ambiguities,
> pictures that didn't reflect my OOo, skipped basics, examples
> without explanations and explanations without examples. Many of
> the pop-ups and drop downs that were supposed to ease the pain only
> made things more confusing. Many of the concepts were
> counter-intuitive. I don't mean contrary to the way things are
> done on other systems but just downright didn't make sense.
>
> I know these remarks are very general, but much of what I finally
> got was through dumb luck and I doubt if I could purposefully
> reproduce all the individual problems and mis-understandings here
> for comment
>
> I think that the whole issue of using 'Styles' -- an important
> concept for an office suite -- should be revisited and rethought
> through from top to bottom.
>
> And, by the way, I did finally get things working the way I wanted,
> but Gawd it was hard.
One thing that did get through is this: you are very frustrated.
Then again, you also created a problem for someone else: the
person or persons who wrote the documentation. Now they can be just
as frustrated as you. That is because they do not know where to make
any changes to make the information more understandable: you have not
told them.
Specifically, what did you consult in the documentation when
looking for help on styles? (Specific name please.) Give some
examples of some of the problems you ran into that took so much time
to solve.
Did you also consult the information about templates? If so, what
manual? (Templates are used to create a new document with a specific
list of included styles.)
You see, without specific information as to your problems, there
is no way to make sure the next person will not have the same bad
experience. Then the time you took to write your email will have been
wasted because no really long lasting result will have come from it.
Dan
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