My mother, while not completely hopeless with computers, does have a certain naivety with them. She once called me in the middle of the night telling me "the internet is down" when her dial-up modem gave her a busy signal. When she said her email client wasn't displaying properly I noticed she had somehow made the window tiny. I fixed it by maximizing its window. The list goes on.
Where she leaves me in the dust, however, is in her understanding of Microsoft Office. We were testing OpenOffice to see if it will replace Microsoft Office for her, and she had lots of questions to which I had no answers. Off we went to the online OpenOffice help and the web.
While we eventually got her questions answered it made me realize how little I know about using an office suite. I use it mainly for opening existing documents, writing letters, and using existing templates for projects such as cards or CD covers. When I was alerted to In Pictures I decided to give them a try.
In Pictures offers tutorials on Microsoft Office 2003, OpenOffice 2.0, Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8, and HTML & CSS. They seem to update their tutorials regularly; Fireworks 8 was just recently added, and their website says Office 2007, Photoshop, MySQL, and PHP tutorials are coming soon. They also offer downloadable PDF files and bound books of their tutorials for an additional cost.
Their philosophy is "The simpler, the better." The tutorials are given with black and white screenshots, with red markers showing you points of interest or where to click next. The lessons are given step by step, with explanations of what you are actually doing throughout.
The first tutorial I tried was for OpenOffice's database component Base. I had never used Base before, but while following the tutorial I was amazed at how much I was actually understanding. I was really grasping the concepts, rather than just clicking through the steps. The screenshots show you exactly what to do and the steps are easy to follow, clearly explaining what you are doing.
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