Hi, everyone! Once again, I've been neglecting this blog a bit and I definitely have some Office 2010 posting to do (among other things). But, in the meantime, I've recently received several questions that were unanswerable ... so thought I'd post for those who have not received a response and let you know why. If you are among those who didn't receive a reply, feel free to resend your question in a way that I can reply to it.
If a question is fully asked by a polite person and I don't have enough information to answer - I'll reply to let you know what info I need to be able to help you. NO problem whatsoever.
In fact, I suppose this post really could be called - 'Text messaging and Twitter culture are making people even less polite' - at least that's the gist of it.
Okay - so just a few suggestions when writing with a request for help (these can be useful as well when posting to newsgroups or any sort of forum where you're asking people you don't know to help you voluntarily):
- Unless you're positive that an abbreviation is well known and you've seen it written in publications outside of your own company (such as VBA or OOXML), take the time to spell out complete words. If you can't be bothered to write your entire question, should I really take my time to try to decipher your shorthand in order to help you?
- If your question is about something where you frankly just don't know some info that might be important (like what version of Office you use, for example) - the one thing you can always do is be polite enough to send your question as if you are actually asking a human being for help and not typing your question into a search engine. I'm happy to help any polite person find information I might need to be able to help you. More bluntly put - words like 'hello' or 'thank you' aren't a waste of character count. I like Twitter, too - but you don't have a 140 character limit when asking a question here.
- That said ... if you send a question that's longer and more detailed than a typical project spec I would receive from a client... well, um ... just don't. Thanks.
Okay - well, those who have been following me for awhile know that every once in awhile I get a few questions that prompt me to need to vent a bit like this. So, it's really important that I add the following to this post:
This post is NOT meant for you very nice people who make up 95% of the emails I receive with help requests. I would NEVER want to dissuade any polite person from sending a request for help. I really enjoy being able to help and thoroughly welcome your questions.
Okay - that's it for this rant ...
Happy Thursday everybody!
