However Beginner Education (BE) is just as important
I can recall when every new version of Word came with a tutorial disk or
book. I found these quite helpful. Now, except for its online articles,
Microsoft leaves this type of documentation to third parties, and quite a
few authors have made a lucrative business of it (think of Woody et al.).
Microsoft's assumption (which is valid to some extent) is that most users of
new versions of Office are not new Office users. Most of us upgrade from
Word 2002 to 2003 (or 97 or 2000 to 2003) and already know how to do most of
what we need to do.
What I would really like to see is an extension of the "What's New in Word
xxxx" KB articles. There's usually one such for each version (though it
sometimes takes a while to come out), but it's mostly a list of the features
with some marketing hype, not any explanation of why you might want to use
the features, much less how to implement them. It could be argued that if
you get a list of the new features and some of them sound interesting, you
can then investigate them in the Help file or in online articles; the
problem with that is that the Help is usually (a) mostly inherited from
previous versions and (b) prepared at the last minute when the feature set
is final and consequently doesn't always have adequate documentation of new
features, and articles about them are often slow to appear because UA is
still figuring them out, too. (Presumably designers and developers, who
dream up these new features, are not qualified to write the documentation.)
Third-party books often focus on new features because the author has almost
certainly participated in beta testing, which focuses on these new features.
The problem here is that, given publishing deadlines (the goal is to have
the books hit the streets at the same time as the software), the
descriptions and instructions are often wrong, either because a feature
received last-minute tweaking or because it couldn't be made to work
reliably at all and was dropped.
To get some idea what all these writers are up against, consider these
analogies:
1. Trying to write a newspaper description (on deadline) of a protean beast
that keeps changing shape before your eyes.
2. Trying to make a fitted wedding dress for a bride who has gained or lost
10 or 15 pounds every time she comes in for a fitting.
See also
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WheresTheManual.htm
--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
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