David Bowles wrote : <snip>
What's a better approach? Well, almost every function within an application is readily accessible through the ubiquitous drop-down menu system. Furthermore most drop-down menu systems have an application-independent standard structure that's both consistent and highly logical --
'File'; 'Edit'; 'Insert'; 'etc...'; '...Help'.
Hence once a student has learned how to access a particular function via the drop-down menu system, this skill is immediately transferable to almost any other software application that utilises the same or a similar function.
<snip> Would that it were so simple. The problem is that you know what you want to do, the difficulty is finding out what the application calls it. The help file is often worse than useless because it uses the application specific vocabulary. I've been in IT for over 20 years and used a range of systems from CPM, Xenix, Unix, Linux, OS2, DOS, Windows from 2.1, Acorn variously, Mac OS variously. I've also used a wide range of applications including Wordstar, Vi, Edlin, Word all the way up from Word for DOS etc etc. I quite agree that if you know what you want to do and have a bit of experience, then you can find the words for it. The difficulty is that people need to have a range of synonyms for the same operation to cope with the descriptions different systems use. Another problem is what do you want to do with the data. Typical examples, if you cut and paste between a word processor and a spreadsheet what do you want to happen? If you copy and paste between a web page and a word processor, what do you want to happen? If you are cleaning up text, how many people can use regular expressions and how can you be sure your package supports them? OK Most of the standard functions, cut paste, undo, select all, open, close, save now have standard shortcut keys across a wide variety of systems. What we need is the "fun" stuff like autotext and formatting numbers. Again a simple example, applying a numeric (or other format) in a mail merge to compensate for deficiencies in data transfer / export. Or the problems of coaxing data out in a suitable format to avoid the need for "corrections" in the mail merge. -- John McCabe (manager@enorf.ac.uk) Cthulhu loves me, this I know; the Necronomicon told me so.