[6283] in s-news-athena
Re: Use the electronic help facility.
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Z. Todd Taylor)
Fri Jan 27 12:28:07 1995
Date: Fri, 27 Jan 1995 08:45:52 -0800 (PST)
From: d3a061@aggie.pnl.gov (Z. Todd Taylor)
To: s-news@utstat.toronto.edu
Cc: zt_taylor@pnl.gov
Bill Venables writes:
> You may take longer to find it, of course, but I am sure if it is
> used effectively the help facility will get you there much faster
> than any hardcopy documentation (yes, *any* :-). In every course
> I teach no matter how much I stress to my students how valuable
> it is, they still seem to head for the books first. I simply
> cannot understand people's reluctance to use the electronic help.
Maybe I can shed some light on that. While I certainly like having
on-line help and use it frequently, if I had the choice of on-line
help or a hardcopy manual, I'd take the manual any day. There are
several reasons:
1) I can carry the manual with me and read it in spare moments
(like on a plane, at a bus stop, ...)
2) Reading things on-line is harder on the eyes and slower
(once I've found the right pages). In a book, I can flip
back and forth between two related sections in a fraction of
a second. My eyes can glance at the text on one page and
the example on the next almost without moving. With on-line
help, I have to bounce on the scroll bar...
3) This is the main reason. On-line help assumes I've already
started the software and know enough about it to know where
to start looking. Context-sensitive help is a great tool
once you've mastered the basics, but it can't teach me the
basics as well as a printed manual can. Software that has
abandoned printed documentation in favor of on-line help
eliminates my opportunity to familiarize myself with the
software's lingo before running it.
