Is this Application Central?

[xenou]

I find this very interesting reading too! Snowblizz, if you have any links to your work or forums you've been involved in let me know - sounds very interesting. I participate in kubuntuforums.net and both there and here have found the forums to be of great value to me for learning and developing my skills (here, Excel/VBA, there Linux O/S). Naturally, I try to "give back". Alex.

 

[Neltu]

As a new member of the forums and being completly new to excel as well. I figured i would offer my perspective.

I was instructed to learn macros to teach to others, and didnt have the slightest clue on entering formulas. I was told that i would not be able to expense any books or clases. My previous excel experience was limited to taking someone else workbook and tinkering with it until it was completly destroyed, or worked in some very brute force way to get the results that i needed.

My first post was once of the questions that probably annoy you the most, but i have to say it was my complete ignorance that resulted in that. I had searched for any solution that was similar to what I would want and would try to adjust accordingly. I was thinking it was probably not much of a problem for the experienced people and that i could take whatever solution was offered and be able to modify it for other uses.

Needless to say i was a bit dismayed at first when my original post was ignored, however as i started to write code using recorders, and trying to modify other's code and started getting things to work i realized how bad my original post actually was just because of plain ignorance.

While it is certainly possible that alot of people just want answers, i think some of it is just plain ignorance.

 

[Stormseed]

Jim,

Who developed Microsoft Excel ?

 

[snowblizz]

I find this very interesting reading too! Snowblizz, if you have any links to your work or forums you've been involved in let me know - sounds very interesting. I participate in kubuntuforums.net and both there and here have found the forums to be of great value to me for learning and developing my skills (here, Excel/VBA, there Linux O/S). Naturally, I try to "give back". Alex.

Not as such, no. Yet at least. Just half a dozen half-done manuscripts and a couple of submissions. Research after all has to be more than just what you think is a great idea.
I'm at the beginning of the road really. I've mostly been reading some help forums not so much engaging in them. www.tek-tips.com, and MS own forums are places I've searched and found help before I was given the suggestion of these forums, ozgrid.com and excelforums.com (sic?)
There are obviously a lot more. I also hang around a lot of non-development forums in my free time, i.e. those concerning my hobbies. I didn't really consider doing it on "university time" before I read a paper about "netnography" where I realised it might actually be justafiable to "surf the net". "Yes professor, this IS acutally doing research."
In some ways it combines elements of action research and "netnography", I've managed to experience the "thrill" of being able to answer questions and people being genuinely happy they have received soluitons. As well as the frustration of trying to deal with large or badly specified questions. All in a few weeks.
While on-line forums seems like an obvious and great place to find help to me (and many of my friends), I've found that it isn't necessarily so in general. I discussed it with a colleague recently and she suggested it was mostly knowledgeable people who would congreate on-line, in so far as research as looked at Linux and OSS communities she makes a good point. But looking at some of the questions here, and those such as referred to in this thread it probably isn't that simple. Or so I hope, because if you need extensive knowledge to use a forum I'm probably up the creek without a paddle. Though technically I suppose it doesn't matter. My thesis could eventually just as easily find that EUD support is not possible through on-line means. Though looking at places such as this I find that highly unlikely as an outcome.

 

[xenou]

Update us from time to time how its going! Another interesting use of online support (i.e. forums style) was one I encountered when I bought a linksys router. I posted a few help questions in their "community forum". But it seems to me that it is partially "staffed" by employees of Linksys to answer questions in the forum - I can't be sure but my impression was that some of the more knowledgeable and frequent posters were not doing it out of mere kindness.

david.

 

[Richard Schollar]

david.

Nice one Alex - just go and confuse the heck out of everybody

 

[xenou]

oops... how'd I miss that...? Er, no idea who david is ...

 

[snowblizz]

Update us from time to time how its going! Another interesting use of online support (i.e. forums style) was one I encountered when I bought a linksys router. I posted a few help questions in their "community forum". But it seems to me that it is partially "staffed" by employees of Linksys to answer questions in the forum - I can't be sure but my impression was that some of the more knowledgeable and frequent posters were not doing it out of mere kindness.

I most likely will. In fact at some point I will be asking for permission to conduct a web-questionnaire here.

Indeed there are those who get paid to populate forums, usually the official communities, but I understand there are also those who are on third-party sites, again in OSS. MySQL uses its forum/community extensively to communicate and support its users. So there you could indeed get a MySQL developer to answer your questions. "Professional support" people don't seem to be a large part of the population but they do exist.