A moment of frustration...

Is it just me, or does it seem like a lot of posts are less questions on how to do things and more like development requests?

I just wanted to comment on the fact that your last two topics rhyme and that you have a nice little haiku started:

Big O Notation
A moment of frustration...

Click to expand...

I'm waiting on the edge of my seat for the third line!

seriously though, this place is a great resource and you really can't blame people for trying to get something for nothing. I think in the Access forum most of the "experts" are good about asking the OP to break down the request into a specific issue needing to be resolved. Maybe that doesn't happen as often on the Excel side (it's been a while since I've looked).

Giacomo

Big O Notation
A moment of frustration...
O Exclamation?

I'm new to the board, but I have already notice that if an OP has a problem, many are unsatisfied with "Oh, you need the MATCH function"; they want (and many of us show-offs are eager to supply) the exact keystrokes to meet their need.

The seems to be less interest in "learning to progam a spreadsheet" than in "solving this problem, I don't care why the solution works" .

Not all posters, but enough that that is my initial impression of this site.

Aaron,

This theme comes up periodically (maybe Jon P. could create us a nice chart of its frequency .)

Regardless of the amount of input from the various camps: it more or less usually boils down to "if you feel someone is asking for handouts of fish when he has not even tried casting a line himself just move along and let the post sink." Put another way: "let someone who feels like spoonfeeding the infants do so."

Hi,

Do a search for "spoonfeeding": you'll find more threads about this subject
We are part of a community and do not share the same principles all the time. We have to live with that.

rather frequently we can see this kinda threads
OP: 10:00 AM "how would I ..."
teacher: 10:05 AM "take a look at ..."
spoonfeeder: 10:45 AM "this is your solution"
when you're the teacher, you could think: "why doesn't this spoonfeeder see I want to teach the OP to fish?"
when you're the spoonfeeder, you could think: "why doesn't this teacher see that the OP is never going to make it by himself?"

seen from viewpoint of "postcount-members":
teacher: "hmm, if I do this step by step, I can add 4 or 5 easily to my postcount"
spoonfeeder: "this is an easy one from my library: let's throw it in there, makes me a quick +1 or perhaps +2"

seen from viewpoint of "searching-members":
about teacher: "so complicated to get to my goal" or "interesting additional information"
about spoonfeeder: "this doesn't learn me anything about the background" or "nice and easy resource"

to be clear: I didn't tell I couldn't be one of those from time to time

different view-points: let's live together in peace

greetings from Belgium,
Erik

Depends how much has been asked for. It's unlikely that a whole project is going to be solved but sometimes you can have quite a large request that someone completely solves for the OP and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

I've read posts that give full sections of code or a complete formula which answers the question without any more questions being answered. If I then use that I'll look through it and try and understand why it works.

If you're the kind of person who just wants the answer and doesn't care about the how or why that's also fine but you're less likely to get help in the first instance and less likely to be able to adapt it for your own use.

Nick

Yah you're probably right. Moment over I just read about 12 of these in a row right before I posted: "My boss asked me to put together a program that downloads 12 websites, parses the text to flat file format, loads it into access for warehousing, sends it to excel for summary reports and analytics and then posts it to our company website in flash. How do I do that?"
And I just wanted to type "You call a consulting firm..." But I started in whinging in this thread instead

... I just read about 12 of these in a row right before I posted: "My boss asked me to put together a program that downloads 12 websites, parses the text to flat file format, loads it into access for warehousing, sends it to excel for summary reports and analytics and then posts it to our company website in flash. How do I do that?" ...
-oorang

Click to expand...

I had also noticed what I perceived to be an uptick in posts of this type. If I respond at all, it's usually just with a link to http://www.mrexcel.com/consult.shtml But I always find myself wondering what nit-witted boss would delegate such a complex task to someone that obviously does not have the skill set needed. Is it a small company where they just don't have the man-power? Or is the boss just this clueless?

I probably fall more on the spoonfeeder side, if anything, but I don't feel horribly about it. Most generally, I assume that there are two types of people posting: ones than want to learn and ones that don't. If they want to learn and I pop and equation out there that they need, then they'll probably go through it and figure out why it works and what they did before didn't. If they don't want to learn, then they just use the equation with nary another thought about it.
Alternatively, if I try to teach someone who wants to learn, then that works out similarly to how it might have worked out if I just gave the answer. If I try to teach someone who doesn't want to learn, I'm really just wasting my time.
The ones that really get under my skin are the ones that finish up with: "CONSIDER THIS URGENT/TOP PRIORITY AND GET BACK TO ME AT LAZY@CONFUSEDABOUTWHATTHISBOARDREALLYIS.NET"
Does anyone really think that putting something in all caps is really going to move it to the top of my priority list, above breathing, eating, and my own work?