We all occasionally hit a wall working with an application. Whether we're working with Office, Quickbooks, SBA, or other applications, sometimes we reach the natural and logical limits of our experience with an application. Support lines and knowledgebases help when things break, but there are still gaps between the normal resources (reference materials, vendor blogs, training courses and reference manuals), and the things you need to know to accomplish. One underutilized resource for support is various USENET newsgroups. Newsgroups allow users to have questions answered by other users, and are a remarkably effective way to figure out how to do things with a software app. Some of the newsgroups I use frequently include:
- microsoft.public.excel (n.b. all MS groups are from the newsserver at news.microsoft.com)
- microsoft.public.excel.programming
- alt.comp.software.financial.quickbooks
- alt.comp.software.financial.peachtree
- microsoft.public.sba.general Try them out, and see - many times, questions are answered before you can get back from lunch (!)
