Errors in Microsoft's Excel Spreadsheet Program Online Help
The imperfections in the Microsoft Help documentation in the Microsoft Excel Spreadsheet Program, are a minor problem for those who have friends and family to help them learn the program, but for those who do not have friends or family to help them with such, these imperfections in help for the program are a major problem--a major problem that produces for these less fortunate without friends to help them, humiliation, and also under-valuation, low grades on the curve, to add to the burden they have already experienced from getting humiliating error messages while using imperfectly documented Microsoft programs other than Microsoft Excel.
(We all want friends or family to help us learn softwares, at the same time we are all sick of helping friends and family learn softwares)
ERROR MESSAGE: In the jazzy new Excel interface, the help section is reached via a tiny blue button a quarter of an inch or less in diameter, which is on a blue background in the upper right hand corner of the page. I did not even see this button until I had used Excel for hours. Once I saw it it did not seem like it could be the main help button for the whole program. I at first thought the jazzy new interface had done away with a help section. New users of a software should have not a minute of trouble finding the help section.
ERROR MESSAGE: The help pages that you go to using the Excel help section appear in your browser history, they can be viewed in the browser window, saved as htm, put in a favorites folder. In the browser history these help pages are all titled 'Excel Help' but you can add them to a favorites section and retitle them. You can save the help pages appearing in the browser as html pages. Viewing the help pages in the browser you can thankfully use toolbar multicolored hiliting features to help you digest them. These are significant advantages but Microsoft fails to insure that new Excel users know about this advantage when they first attempt to learn Excel, which is the time at which such advantages are most useful to them.
ERROR MESSAGE It is easy to get lost in the Microsoft Office Online pages, losing contact with pages such as (Exhibit A) http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR100479681033.aspx (THE PAGE THAT CONTAINS THE LINKS TO THE ONLINE EXCEL 2007 TRAINING COURSES), because of the way the directory links such as 'Home > Help and How-to' at the top of the pages are set up.
I got to the Exhibit A page mentioned in the above paragraph from a link in (Exhibit B) the Excel 2007 Help page at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/FX100646951033.aspx .
At the top of the Exhibit A list of tutorials page, if in the directory links 'Home > Help and How-to > Training' at the top of the page you click training, you get sent to (Exhibit C) http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/FX100565001033.aspx the help and how to page for Office Online as a whole not Excel specifically. This Exhibit C page has no link to take you back to Exhibit A the Excel tutorials list page you just came from; it is a page focused on Powerpoint not Excel. The directory links page at the top of the Exhibit A page should take you to back to the Exhibit B Excel Help page, not the Exhibit C Office Online as a whole page.
To experience the madness of being bounced in and out of subject areas by directory links that take you to wrong destinations and do not get you back to where you came from, while navigating a website containing huge numbers of pages such as the Microsoft Office Online website, is a terrible burden for those in the early stages of learning a software. If page X is the page you go to by mistake, and page A is the page you were at first, you could have a bad problem trying to get back to page X, going through lots of similar looking pages crammed with lots of similar looking small print all the pages having similar titles.
ERROR MESSAGE I was cruising through the Excel tutorial that starts at (Exhibit D) http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC100620751033 with the greatest of ease, when I crashed head on into a concrete wall. See, the tutorial made the brilliant move of instead of working with us students on a sample Excel workbookthat it the tutorial provided, having us students open an Excel workbook we had already created, and then walking us through some manipulations of said workbook. Thus all us students ended up opening different workbooks and some of us had no workbook to open at all. Aii I luckily had on hand was a workbook that I had imported into Excel from Peachtree. When I tried to total up a column in said workbook by putting a formula into a cell, the text and numbers in the formula itself were saved into the cell not the total of the numbers in the column. I was completely lost.
ERROR MESSAGE At this point I was on my own, left up to my own devices to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
ERROR MESSAGE I faced the weirdness that there were little triangles in the the upper left hand corners in the cells in a column I had added to the worksheet I had imported from Peachtree that I was working with. I could not figure out what these little triangles meant, or how to make them go away. I should not have to face such confusion so early in the game, being not a fool to be punished by the wrath of God and the fury of his ministers, but rather simply a novice innocent in the sense of merely being totally inexperienced with Excel. Somehow I clicked in the cells with the triangles, when I did this an explanation mark appeared next to them, I clicked on the exclamation mark, it informed me that the cells were formatted as text not numbers, I corrected the problem, and the cell I designated to sum up the cells above it finally succeeded in summing them. But in so doing I experienced frustration and mental emotional and physical fatigue.
ERROR MESSAGE: The exclamation mark mentioned in the above paragraph should not have been a mystery to me at this error filled stage of the game.
@2006 David Virgil Hobbs
(We all want friends or family to help us learn softwares, at the same time we are all sick of helping friends and family learn softwares)
ERROR MESSAGE: In the jazzy new Excel interface, the help section is reached via a tiny blue button a quarter of an inch or less in diameter, which is on a blue background in the upper right hand corner of the page. I did not even see this button until I had used Excel for hours. Once I saw it it did not seem like it could be the main help button for the whole program. I at first thought the jazzy new interface had done away with a help section. New users of a software should have not a minute of trouble finding the help section.
ERROR MESSAGE: The help pages that you go to using the Excel help section appear in your browser history, they can be viewed in the browser window, saved as htm, put in a favorites folder. In the browser history these help pages are all titled 'Excel Help' but you can add them to a favorites section and retitle them. You can save the help pages appearing in the browser as html pages. Viewing the help pages in the browser you can thankfully use toolbar multicolored hiliting features to help you digest them. These are significant advantages but Microsoft fails to insure that new Excel users know about this advantage when they first attempt to learn Excel, which is the time at which such advantages are most useful to them.
ERROR MESSAGE It is easy to get lost in the Microsoft Office Online pages, losing contact with pages such as (Exhibit A) http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/CR100479681033.aspx (THE PAGE THAT CONTAINS THE LINKS TO THE ONLINE EXCEL 2007 TRAINING COURSES), because of the way the directory links such as 'Home > Help and How-to' at the top of the pages are set up.
I got to the Exhibit A page mentioned in the above paragraph from a link in (Exhibit B) the Excel 2007 Help page at http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/excel/FX100646951033.aspx .
At the top of the Exhibit A list of tutorials page, if in the directory links 'Home > Help and How-to > Training' at the top of the page you click training, you get sent to (Exhibit C) http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/training/FX100565001033.aspx the help and how to page for Office Online as a whole not Excel specifically. This Exhibit C page has no link to take you back to Exhibit A the Excel tutorials list page you just came from; it is a page focused on Powerpoint not Excel. The directory links page at the top of the Exhibit A page should take you to back to the Exhibit B Excel Help page, not the Exhibit C Office Online as a whole page.
To experience the madness of being bounced in and out of subject areas by directory links that take you to wrong destinations and do not get you back to where you came from, while navigating a website containing huge numbers of pages such as the Microsoft Office Online website, is a terrible burden for those in the early stages of learning a software. If page X is the page you go to by mistake, and page A is the page you were at first, you could have a bad problem trying to get back to page X, going through lots of similar looking pages crammed with lots of similar looking small print all the pages having similar titles.
ERROR MESSAGE I was cruising through the Excel tutorial that starts at (Exhibit D) http://office.microsoft.com/training/training.aspx?AssetID=RC100620751033 with the greatest of ease, when I crashed head on into a concrete wall. See, the tutorial made the brilliant move of instead of working with us students on a sample Excel workbookthat it the tutorial provided, having us students open an Excel workbook we had already created, and then walking us through some manipulations of said workbook. Thus all us students ended up opening different workbooks and some of us had no workbook to open at all. Aii I luckily had on hand was a workbook that I had imported into Excel from Peachtree. When I tried to total up a column in said workbook by putting a formula into a cell, the text and numbers in the formula itself were saved into the cell not the total of the numbers in the column. I was completely lost.
ERROR MESSAGE At this point I was on my own, left up to my own devices to figure out what was wrong and how to fix it.
ERROR MESSAGE I faced the weirdness that there were little triangles in the the upper left hand corners in the cells in a column I had added to the worksheet I had imported from Peachtree that I was working with. I could not figure out what these little triangles meant, or how to make them go away. I should not have to face such confusion so early in the game, being not a fool to be punished by the wrath of God and the fury of his ministers, but rather simply a novice innocent in the sense of merely being totally inexperienced with Excel. Somehow I clicked in the cells with the triangles, when I did this an explanation mark appeared next to them, I clicked on the exclamation mark, it informed me that the cells were formatted as text not numbers, I corrected the problem, and the cell I designated to sum up the cells above it finally succeeded in summing them. But in so doing I experienced frustration and mental emotional and physical fatigue.
ERROR MESSAGE: The exclamation mark mentioned in the above paragraph should not have been a mystery to me at this error filled stage of the game.
@2006 David Virgil Hobbs
posted by David Virgil at 2:18 AM
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