RTFM

When I got my first computer some 30 years ago (a NewBrain with a whopping 32k of memory) one of the things people used to say when one got stuck was RTFM -- Read The F*** Manual (where "f" was a variable to which you could assign a word of your choosing).

In other words, when all else fails, read the instructions.

Now, however, there are no instructions to read.

We recently installed Microsoft Office 2010.

It is useful for reading those .docx files people keep sending me.

But Microsoft office has no manual. There are no instuctions to read.

Recently a document opened with a fat blue stripe down the right-hand side. I wanted to get rid of it. When I hovered my cursor over it, it said "markup area". So I typed "markup area" into the help file to find out what it is, and how to get rid of it. Nothing, zero, zilch.

My daughter has been raving about Microsoft OneNote, that comes with MS Office. It sounded interesting, so I had a look at it. It has a blurb that tells you how easy it is to use. You just dump all your information into it. That's a bit like telling you to toss all your stuff into an abandoned well and cover it up. It's easy to put it in, but not to get it out again.

I browsed through the computer books in a bookshop the other day.

There was not one on how to use Microsoft OneNote. There were books on MS Office on offer, ranging in price from expensive to exorbitant. Only the exorbitant ones mentioned OneNote on the cover, and I couldn't look inside to see how many pages they devoted to it because the whole thing was wrapped in plastic.

But there were whole books on how to use Facebook and Twitter.

Back in the 80s we bought computer books to learn how to use computers and programs. But now you can only get manuals for web sites.

I wondered why anyone would need a manual for a web site, when you can't get a manual for a program. Then I saw this:

This applicaticon will be able to:

• Read Tweets from your timeline.
• See who you follow, and follow new people.
• Update your profile.
• Post Tweets for you.

That was from Mashable. All I wanted to do was vote for something, once, yet in order to do that I had to let them do all that. I had to allow them to update my profile -- so hey, if someone at Mashable wants to update my profile to say that I'm an international money launderer, wanted in sixteen principalities and native states, I must let them do it? Not a chance.

There are two buttons - Save and Cancel. I click Cancel -- but no, they won't let me do that before I've filled in my e-mail and password. Eventually I entered a bogus username and eight asterisks for my password (Ha! Those password crackers will never guess that!). Then I could click cancel and depart.

So perhaps one does need a manual to understand web sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Only problem is they keep changing them, so the book is probably out of date before you've bought it.

For weeks Facebook has been telling me that I can no longer notify people about my blog posts in my "Notes", but I will still be able to do it on my "Wall" but when I want to share something that someone else has written by putting it on my "Wall" it tells me it has been posted to my "Profile". So are Walls, Profiles and Notes all the same thing?

Perhaps I really do need to RTFM.

Meanwhile, instead of OneNote, I'll continue to use askSam, which I've been using for the last 20 years, and I still haven't managed to exhaust its capabilities.

Book Review: Doing everything with MS Access

How to Do Everything with Microsoft Office Access 2003 by Virginia Anderson


My rating: 3 of 5 stars
In reviewing a book on how to use a computer program, I suppose the most important point is whether it helps one to use the program effectively. There was a time when buying a computer program included a substantial user's manual, but no longer. Most programs come with rather skimpy manuals, and one often has to buy a third-party book to fill in some of the gaps.

This book is mistitled. It does not tell you how to do everything with MS Access. It tells you how to do some things, the basic things. It is a beginner's guide, and to the extent that it is that, it does it fairly successfully. It doesn't tell very much about how to use Visual Basic for Applications, which one needs to do to produce all but very simple database applications that can be used by other people. So the title is misleading.

I found it generally useful, but there was one serious flaw. It describes a sample database application for creating tables, queries and entry forms. But when it comes to reports, it works on an entirely different set of hypothetical tables, for which no samples are given in the text, and they are onyl described very sketchily -- a police database. This makes it very difficult to see how the reports work, when one cannot create the tables on which the reports should be based. This is a serious flaw, so I can't give the book more than two stars.

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