Re: Levels of detail -- are we beyond this?

[voxwoman <voxwoman -at- gmail -dot- com>]

On Fri, Aug 15, 2008 at 4:38 PM, Geoff Hart <ghart -at- videotron -dot- ca> wrote:

> Tom Johnson wondered: <<I just ran into some detailed instructions on
> going to a website that look like this:
>    1. Open Internet Explorer by clicking *Start* > *Programs* >
> *Internet
>    Explorer*.
>    2. In the *Address* field, enter *http://sampleurl.com* and press
> *Enter*.
> Is it me, or is this kind of detail totally unnecessary in this day
> and age?>>
>
> It's you. <g> Actually, I'm only partially kidding about this. The
> real answer is that the level of detail depends entirely on your
> audience. There's still a startling degree of computer illiteracy out
> there, and unless you can be sure that your audience already knows
> these kinds of things, sometimes you really do have to provide
> "training wheels".
>
>
I just joined a budding Parent-Teacher group as the secretary. The president
sent out a list of all the officers in a Worrd 2007 (docx) format. I knew
immediately that there would be a nonzero amount of people on the list with
earlier versions of Word, so I sent out the link to the MS "patch" that lets
Office 2003 read Office 2007 files with instructions, and a request that
further documents be saved using the "compatible" format option.

Of course, I got an email back from our president, saying that "the last
paragraph was gibberish to her" (the one about save the files in doc
format), and also that "some people can't open the file... Can you help?"

I just should have saved the file in the older format and re-sent without
all the instructions (that assumed a basic level of knowledge that few of
these people had). The AOL email addresses should have been a clue...

-Wendy
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