TECHMUNDO 2.0

I’m not a person who reads their manuals. I normally rip open the box and toss it aside, and just look for it when I’m ready to sell it off for another upgrade; but I saw myself thumbing through the manual of the E61 last night.

I got a comment in one of my posts asking me for some tips on the Sheet application and I found the user manual very lacking in information. I can’t understand why the manual would offer a longer procedure to do a simple task, for instance, inserting values on the cell the manual instructed that I should click Options > Show Cell Field > Edit Cell Field when clicking the joystick button accomplishes the same thing much faster. I also wanted to learn about which formulas I could use and the manual had nothing on it. I eventually found the information I needed about formulas in the Sheet’s help section.

Now I understand why the tips page gets flocked by a lot of users. As I don’t use every single feature of my E61, I have to rely on emails from readers of this blog, posts from forums and blog entries from other E61 sites. I’ll try to create tips for the applications I regularly use and update the tips section regularly, but it just strikes me as odd that instead of making things simpler, the manual sometimes complicates simple procedures. I don’t understand why certain shortcuts have in fact been coded into the application and the manual doesn’t reflect these shortcuts; leaving users to have to rely on sheer luck or intuition to deduce the existence of such.

An ambitious project, but maybe when I get more tips and shortcuts, I’ll publish a pdf version my E61 manual.