Sub-forums

[MN-Investor]

I just discovered this message board, so maybe this question has been asked and answered before.

It's wonderful that there are so many posters actively using this board, but I find it difficult to use the Excel forum because of the high activity. Has any thought been given to breaking the Excel forum up into sub-forums? In other words, have one forum dedicated to Excel formulas, one to Excel VBA, one to Excel pivot tables, etc. I know there would be overlap, but, geez, it has to be better than the one huge forum.

 

[Jon von der Heyden]

Hi and welcome to the board

I do recall similar suggestions in the past. I think the fast pace is what so many of our members enjoy here. Many of our members here do also post on other forums and I know some of *us* find the sub forums a little bit tricky, because as you say there will be alot of overlap.

Also, we have alot of traffic here and having sub-forums would make moderation alot more difficult. I have noticed on those forums that do have sub-forums, one tends to become the 'main' and often posters wrongly rely on that forum for al types of questions. From a moderating perspective, that would involve alot of activity moving threads about.

But I have a few tips for using our main forum.

When posting, use tags. You can also search tags and it makes indexing alot better.

Use the forum search functionaility, and even use google (see link in my signature).

Find out who the experts are in the different subjects and seek out their posts.

 

[MrKowz]

Another thing I could see with sub-forums is that a user might post a question where they think only a VBA response would work and use the VBA forum (but a formula solution is optimal), or they don't know VBA, so they inherently go to the Formula forums. Or... god forbid... a VBA generated pivot table that relies on large worksheet formulas!

 

[Peter_SSs]

Another thing I could see with sub-forums is that a user might post a question where they think only a VBA response would work and use the VBA forum (but a formula solution is optimal), or they don't know VBA, so they inherently go to the Formula forums.

Exactly, it is quite common for members to ask for a specific type of answer only to find that members here can suggest a much better type of answer. This would mean posts would regularly end up in the wrong forum.

For example, the best Pivot Table solution on the whole site could be residing in the formulas sub-forum because the user thought he needed a whole lot of SUMPRODUCT formulas. Other users then searching the Pivot Table sub-forum would not find this great solution.

In fact we just recently got rid of a second Excel forum (for Technical Excel Issues) because people were posting exactly the same sort of questions there as in the general Excel Questions forum.

Even though the Excel Questions forum is big, searching one forum seems easier to me than searching several.


MN-Investor, you said you were finding the Excel Questions forum difficult to use. If there are specific issues you could raise them here and some of the 'old-hands' could possibly suggest ways to resolve those difficulties.

 

[schielrn]

In fact we just recently got rid of a second Excel forum (for Technical Excel Issues) because people were posting exactly the same sort of questions there as in the general Excel Questions forum.

I just noticed that was gone by you saying it. Shows how much attention I pay to things around here and I actually went in there quite a bit.

 

[diddi]

another point about subforums is that one tends to gravitate to a small area and not get the exposure to new ways of solving a problem.

ive learned so many things in areas that i thought i would never need or use because they are there in your face, and then it turns out to provide a neat solution to something i can use quite often.

another observation i would make based on my own behaviour is the following: i was looking for car forums the other day and on one there must have been 80+ subforums all with a small number of threads and often with no viewers. even tho there might well have been thousands of posts there, it looked desolate and unsupported, so i didnt even bother looking any further.