Ground breaking software decision to save council 60 per cent | eGov monitor
Ground breaking software decision to save council 60 per cent | eGov monitor
That bottom line is really starting to talk. Love it!
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Themocracy
Wow! Free software + Adequate training is cheaper than Expensive-ass software + no/inadequate training. Who woulda thunk it?
Really, Microsoft Office (and OpenOffice, StarOffice, and all other office suites out there now too, probably) all have more functionality that 95%+ of the users will EVER use. (And that percentage is probably low.) I honestly believe that instead of TRAINING users, if a person who really understands the suite would take from an hour to 4 hours to sit down and show the averager user:
A. Where the stuff they REALLY want is.
B. How to set the defaults for the stuff they REALLY want.
then after that, except for the odd “weird” thing that would be needed every blue moon, support calls would disappear. Would the person know “all about” the office suite in question? Of course not. NO ONE DOES. IN ANY CASE. They are just too damn big/complicated. We ALL pick out what we like/need/are forced to use, and go with it. If we need something else, we look around for it until we find it, stumble over it, ask someone else WTF it is, or fake it. (Spaces instead of tabs, anyone?) Until the office suite can read our minds for formatting purposes (“Coming soon in Office 2023 ESP Edition!”) it will always be so. People just want their tools to work, they don’t want to work at them. Welcome to human nature….
AMEN Brother!!!
For the terminal, I am happy with nano or pico. Vi and Emacs are WAY too complicated for this country boy.
I have so much trouble learning new stuff now that I will actually retain, most of it ends up being a relearning experience every time I use the program. I normally use Koffice or Open Office when I have to use a word processor.
I was asked to submit a resume a few years ago and hadn’t needed one years so didn’t have one on hand to give them. I thought about trying to do all the formating and having to learn how to use Open Office to get the look I wanted and decided to do it in html in a text editor instead.
The guy that asked for it came by while I was finishing it and was dumbfounded that I was hand formating the thing, but as I told him – It was easier for me to use the tools I was comfortable with to get the results that I wanted. And after looking at the finished product he was happy. I guess it didn’t hurt that what he was hireing me to do was build a website but the end result was that the resume looked as good as any of the entire kitchen in a box programs could output. It all boils down to the operator… 😉
That’s it! It’s not the tools as much as it is the operator’s comfort/familiarity WITH the tools. (I just wish this damn comment field let me use more tools-but that is probably an operator thing, also….) I have seen many people do all kinds of amazing things with the “wrong” tools much faster/better than other “trained” folks with the “right” tools simply because they were comfortable with the tools, knew what they could/could not do with them, and just DID it, rather than tried to adapt the “proper procedures” to the task at hand. If the finished product works, is elegant, cost-effective, and pleasing to the eye, who cares how it was made? (Sweat-shop and enviromental concerns aside, that is….) And God knows, with 80% of the users out there, you could change the logo on OpenOffice to the Microsoft Office logo, and they would NEVER figure it out-the change, that is. They would figure out the program to just about the same degree-well enough to get just about everything done. What else is necessary? Microsoft has just become the “de-facto” solution and if it is not there, people go “Why isn’t it Microsoft?” Though nowdays they are much more likely to accept the argument that “This is free, and it works better and won’t lock up your computer.” than they used to. Wonder why?