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Avoiding online help (Was: shortsighted or realistic?)
Subject:Avoiding online help (Was: shortsighted or realistic?) From:Steven Brown <stevenabrown -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Wed, 26 Mar 2003 13:41:03 -0800 (PST)
Is online help underused? Consider this.... I once
overheard the following outburst from a manager of a
technical writing department:
"Blah blah blah...and when I hit the Send button in
Outlook I realized I'd accidently sent it to the wrong
person! So I quickly called Jane [the department
secretary] to find out how to recall the message."
Interesting, eh? If a techncial writing manager is
unwilling to use online help to find the answer to a
simple question, what hope do we have of instilling
confidence among those who use the software we
document?
SIDEBAR STORY
Just out of curiousity (having never used the Outlook
recall feature myself) I went into Outlook's online
help to find the answer. The results:
The index did not contain a keyword entry for
"recall." The "message" keyword contained a list of
451 topics.
I could not find an intuitive path in the table of
contents that might lead me to an answer.
Using the Answer Wizard, I quickly found out how to
recall a message with a search using only two
words...recall message.
Steven Brown
Technical Writer
This just in: A fellow TW asked me today to help her
troubleshoot column headings in a Word table. Just
another example of a TW who should know better.
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