Recommendation for new members

... especially those of you who are inexperienced, either with
LibreOffice or with technical writing.

I recommend you join the users support list and/or the forum (see
links below) and read the questions and answers. From this you will
get an idea of the questions users ask. Do you know the answers? If
not, go through the user guides and help and try to find the answers.
This exercise will help you become (more) familiar with both the
program and the existing documentation.

You will find that many questions are very basic and are easily
answered by the regulars on the list or forum. But some questions are
not so easily answered. Often that is because the person asking the
question does know how to explain their problem very well, but
sometimes it's because the question is complex or is related to the
use of more complex parts of LibreOffice. Sometimes the "real"
question is clear if you are familiar with what the user is trying to
do or if you recognise they are using Microsoft terminology and
LibreOffice's terms are different; the user may in fact be asking the
wrong question to get the answer they need.

I encourage you to answer the more difficult questions on the list or
forum, but only if you actually know the answer. (In the past I've
seen many people attempt to be helpful but give a wrong answer -- or
answer the wrong question, because they misunderstood what the
questioner was trying to ask.) Answering questions can be good
practice for writing documentation, and often you can then turn your
answers into FAQs or Howtos or blog posts or other documents. You
might also identify things that should be in the user guides, or
things that are in the guides but not as well written as they should
be or not mentioned in places where users might think to look for
them.

In other words, spending time on the user support list and/or forum
can be a big win/win on several levels.

To subscribe to the users list, send email to
users+subscribe@global.libreoffice.org

To join the forum, go to http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/
and click Register in the upper right.

--Jean

Thank you Jean. I have already subscribed to both the forum and user list as you suggested.

Yet, in my experience training customer service reps, I'd like to add some more advice that may come in useful before answering user's questions.
Answering difficult questions is indeed a great practice. However, considering that users may ask the wrong questions (or the right questions in the wrong words), we have to make sure we master the key concepts before attempting to answer them. Otherwise, we may get confused ourselves and end up messing up our ideas or even the docs we are working on.

What I suggest is to follow a systematic approach:

1). Decide which your area of expertise will be.
LibreOffice is a broad project, and mastering it all may be too much to do it all at once. For example, I never use LO Math because I don't need it but mainly because my knowledge of mathematics is too limited. Instead, I use Calc on a daily basis, so I decided to master that application first.

2). Make acquainted with the application of your choice.
Read the existing user guides. Make yourself familiar with the terminoly and concepts.
  Try the application yourself. This will help you understand it better. Before being ready to answer other people questions, we must be able to answer our own questions. Don't be afraid of asking. Remember that every good teacher has started as a good student.

3). Help other users.
Once we feel confident enough to use the application ourselves, we can start helping others. I usually use the following strategy when dealing with customers:

- Read the question between the lines. What is important is not what the user is asking, but what the user is really trying to do. Remember that they are not specialists and sometimes don't know how to ask for help and end up putting forth general question such as "I cannot use a formula in Calc". Therefore, before attempting to solve a problem, we must guide the user to provide the right info. How can we do it? Simple, ask them more questions. Help the user narrow the question until we know exactly what the problem is.

- Once we pinpoint the problem we can start looking for the answer. If we are familiar with the application, we may possibly know the answer. If not, we will know where to look.

- When we have the answer, put it forth in a clear and consice way.

Hope you find it useful.
Regards

Gabriel

Very well said. Thank you for expanding on my comments about answering
questions. I agree with you 100%.

--Jean