Hi Mark,
Unfortunately manuals distributed with software is mostly a thing
of the past. There is a limit to how many cargo planes worth of
manuals you stuff into a cubicle, and certainly a limit on how much
would be useful to you.
Microsoft provided the newsgroup where your question was actually
answered, they originally hosted newsgroups for many other products
as well in earlier days, now just Microsoft products on their servers.
In any case it is newsgroups where your question was posted and
answered. The "forum" that you posted through is nothing more than
an advertising portal that destroys useful Google web searches and
to a lesser extent also harms Google Groups (newsgroup) searches.
You should first look in Excel Help. It may take some getting used to
but most of the information you need is there. Once you know an
answer try to find it in Help again to find additional information and
it will help you in learning to use Help more efficiently.
The fact that web searches don't work very well is largely due to
duplications caused by about 80 so called "forums", one of which you
are using. I would highly recommend that you learn to use HELP and
read online tutorials, and that when necessary you post directly to
a newsgroup and not through a web site.
There are certainly a lot of people here in the newsgroups that share
your concerns about documentation and help from Microsoft, but
most of your use is going to come from experience from yourself
and as shared with others. You don't expect a car company to
teach you to drive, or teach you how to fix your car. You'd be rather
pressed to find which of a 100 fuses or circuit breakers might be
responsible for an electrical problem in your car..
---
HTH,
David McRitchie, Microsoft MVP - Excel [site changed Nov. 2001]
My Excel Pages:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/excel.htm
Search Page:
http://www.mvps.org/dmcritchie/excel/search.htm
"LTUser54" wrote in message
...
This is a useful forum, and I'm grateful for the impressive and helpful
knowledge base here, but... If freakin' Microsoft had better help
resources we would not need to rely so much on each other.
Their search algorithm if often useless for my needs, and I've carped
about it frequently, for years... and years... When you type in "$" to
get help using Search, online OR Offline, you get nothing useful.
Rediculous, isn't it? And annoying?
I think so...
My argument (in the classic sense) is that we should not need to buy
books, take weeks to learn VBA (and have it WORK!), and have such
difficulty negotiating the software if there were better help resources
bundled within the software, and it was written to be much more user
friendly. Let's all bitch to MS and see if they do anything... in our
lifetimes...
Mark
LTUser
aka Brainless in Boston
--
LTUser54
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