Hi Michael and l10n community Em 12/12/2015 22:48, Michael Bauer escreveu: > To be honest I'm surprised LO has not tried to determine if the in-built > help is actually worth the effort from the end-user POV in contrast to > online help and/or active user forums etc.
Allow me to plea for the help content. There is a dimension where documentation get critical, and this is in the enterprise and in the development. A software that does not carry proper documentation is subject to several drawbacks. First, the help desk of the enterprise need to get trained into the issues of LibreOffice in the same way they need to addres MSOffice issues. For that they need to know how the software works to assist the users. Docs and references are crucial, together with proper professional support. Second, the help desk is often charged per call. Enterprises where user cannot find proper doc in their own language is facing a higher TCO, because users call HD to get what they don't have at hand. Third, in the way open source is developed and LibreOffice in particular, there are no specs written in the canonical form a priori before implementation (as it was in the OpenOffice.org times under SUN/Oracle) and this is a choice LibreOffice made to offload all hassle of development and rush into coding improvements long due. The trade-off is a bunch of nice features very few know how to work and the curious take much long time to figure it. Forth, by writing the help pages we have a minimum of a reference guide to address bugs and regressions. Without a reference, a regression is allway harder to understand for the developer and the QA guys. Think about shortcut ABC, that suddenty does not work anymore... how can the developer be sure the sortcut was inded supposed to do what ABC was designed originally.... So, users may not like the help content as we have today and don't like to press F1, but it is our pursuit of quality software to give them the best we can do in terms of documentation. Admitedly our help system is not a piece of literature easy to read (nor is MS Office too), but it must fullfill the mission to establish the landmark of the sofware behaviour. Yes, "RTFM" comes to my mind actually, but there must be an M somewhere. Finaly, other documentation tools like public forums, books, wikis and even Google are all stars of a documentation constellation but almost never figure in a help desk SLA. As more litterature we produce on LibreOffice, the best, because one of the steepest entry barrier we have to propagate LibreOffice is its lack of culture in the office suite marketplace, something MS already achieved long ago and is extremely hard to displace. Of course, there is room for improvement. The nice part of this is that it is well suited for the non-code-developer community of LibreOffice. Give Help a chance. Kind regards -- Olivier Hallot Comunidade LibreOffice http://ask.libreoffice.org/pt-br -- To unsubscribe e-mail to: l10n+unsubscr...@global.libreoffice.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/global/l10n/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
