I've just been searching for a how-to to give my mother. I am resisting the temptation to scream at my computer and vent my frustration in some entirely non-constructive manner.

Let's compare how-tos to cookery. Most of my recipe books will say 'beat the eggs' as opposed to going into a ridiculous amount of detail on how to beat eggs every time beaten eggs are called for, instead having a 'basic techniques' section in the front where the beating of eggs is explained in great detail.

Now consider what would happen if every recipe in an already large book explained the basic techniques. Every recipe would be unreadably long and hard to memorise. Worse still, if every recipe was written by a different person, every recipe might have a different technique for beating eggs and an inexperienced cook may not make the link that they all do the same thing. Or disaster strikes and the cook doesn't have a blender, and isn't aware that a mug and fork can perform the same task adequately.

In my opinion it is better to separate each building-block step, and explain one possible method of performing each task. This way it's easy for a moderately experienced user to work out what tasks are required and make appropriate substitutions. And some of the steps sink in.

I'll use my mother as an example. My mother's first experiences of word processing were with a hand-me-down PC running windows 3.1, and I think MS Word 6¹. I still think that version of Word was pretty awesome. Now she has a desktop that's run Ubuntu (and Open Office) since Breezy (5.10) and a Vista laptop with Office 2007 (chosen for it's fantastic support of secondary displays²).

Recently I've had to deal with explaining how USB drives, SD cards and similar work, and I've had an uphill battle because tasks were never broken down into small steps. I had to spend a lot of time explaining how a word document is a file just like a picture, or a presentation, and the way in which one moves any file between hard drives and removable storage is exactly the same. Similarly the 'SD cards work just like USB Drives' idea has taken some explaining.

Why? Well back in the early days when she learnt to open a word document by opening Word and using File -> Open. The same technique works quite well in most CUA applications, but I have to do the reminding of 'it's just like Word' sometimes.

I'd really like a to see a 'How to write a good how to' being used and supported amongst software communities, not because people are deliberately being unhelpful but because most people who explain something badly don't know they're doing it. Am I talking sense here, or do people just think I'm being silly about this? Let me know. Go on. YOu don't have to do anything more than pass a captcha to leave a comment.

And to add insult to injury the offending article is published under a Creative Commons licence, but it invokes the No Derivatives clause. My response, I'm not even going to link to the offending howto because I can't be helpful and publish and example of how I think it should be done. I think someone cares more about their gGoogle Ads income than the community.

1. For various reasons I have not lived with my mother for any lenght of time since I was young, and most of the computer usage she has been taught has been taught 'beat the eggs every time' style.
2. I stand by this decision, using Vista on her Dell, one can plug in a monitor once she is logged on, and Vista either does what was done with the same display last time, or presents a dialog asking what to do, and my mother knows which choice to make to have the additional display as a 'secondary monitor'. Powerpoint 2007 is capable of detecting these changes and has a mode where it can offer just the presentation on one display and notes and additional controls aling with the presentation on the other display, allowing way blanking of the secondary display. Nothing else I tried could do this using displays with differing aspect rations when the purchase decision was made. If anyone can do this easily using an open source solution, link me to a how-to and I'll be forever grateful!