Indesign Help is worst than no help.

[ronk15270403]

IF I didn't rely on this program, I would deleted it from my computer.  InDesign "help" is beyond useless:  difficult or impossible to find answers to find anything.  Now answers to many simple, obvious questions.  <disparaging personal remarks removed>  Unless they were instructed by Adobe Management to cut costs until "support" was a joke that they would not have to maintain anymore.  Seriously, this is criminal, especially in light of subscription raises. At the next InDesign event I'm going to bring a bullhorn and make the lives of all the Creative Pro sycophants who think Adobe is so god-like, as miserable as possible.  If it wasn't for Googleing actual users for solutions, I would never have anything explained to me.

[Manan Joshi]

Hi @ronk15270403, this community is a peer to peer community so better use that to put forth your questions/issues and we can have a discussion on how to handle them. Your feeback to Adobe engineering team won't get the correct eyeballs here. Also, if you could tell us what sort of things bother you regarding information not available, then maybe someone here could provide you with better resources to reference in the future.

-Manan

[rob day]

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/user-guide.html

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

For decades now, many programs' help files have just listed the features, sometimes with basic examples. The main reason for this was the company having a book  division.

When I need to look something up I usually google it; this includes the Adobe help files, YouTube videos, and other tutorial sites. 

[Barb Binder]

Hi @ronk15270403:

I see you are new here—welcome.

Ask us your questions on how to use InDesign. That's literally what we are here for. The Adobe Community Experts are long time InDesign users, experts in our field, vetted by Adobe, and have time to give back to the community. 

~Barb

[ronk15270403]

Thank you for the offer, Barb. While I think it is a pathetic business model to resort to user community volunteers to answer questions that companies with good customer service handle themselves, I appreciate folks like you.

Ron Koliha
“Shorter of breath and one day closer to death…”

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I can't think of a single app I've used in... well, decades that had what I would regard as more than minimally useful help. The problem with integrated, context-sensitive help is in the latter point: it's relevant to the immediate context (control, field, icon, menu, etc.) and thus rarely has any useful context about the element's overall use. That is, "help" is almost never anything but sketchily "tutorial."

For an app as awesomely complex and multi-faceted as InDesign, trying to make the "help" system a tutorial accessible to newcomers (to the whole program, or to any given major feature) would fail in every way — it would be too slow and verbose for those who need the "help" of a quick reminder of what a menu or setting does, and too contextual and narrow to teach a novice anything well.

So take InDesign's help for what it is: concise help meant for at least reasonably experienced users, in the most part. Move on to the truly excellent online library of tutorials and long-form "help" that explain everything from basic elements and principles. Go from there to advanced tutorials from many sources that go from explaining how the tool works to how to use it to achieve specific goals and projects.

And when that runs out, stop by here and ask a few centuries of combined expertise to iron out any wrinkles in your misunderstanding, or put a task or feature or bug in context, from experience. Poke around; you'll find that we even ask each other for help fairly often.

I'm not sure how you can fault that; as generally awful as app help alone is, this structure of support is, IMVHO, about as good as it gets without having an expert with unlimited time and patience on speed-dial. (Oh, they're available; please have your credit card ready.) 🙂

And I can point you to a parallel system, in the same general field, with much the same layers, that is so unbelievably awful I recommend even the most confused user go nowhere near it... so I do have a solid baseline for appreciation of the excellence here, even just as a user.

[ronk15270403]

I fully understand your Korporate defense of things are they are: "Go find real support elsewhere. We know Adobe help sucks, but sells books."

I deal with at least a dozen software companies -- albeit orders of magnitude smaller than Adobe -- who answer their phones and give patient help. And one big one…Microsoft.

Long ago (suspiciously right after Adobe went public) support fizzled.  At this point, Adobe could have made a commitment to real support.  Microsoft didn't find it so hard to do and still actually provides personal help.  I know you are faithfully spouting the Party Line, but it wouldn't have had to be this way.

Now Adobe can be content that their support is so abysmal, that a whole aftermarket has sprung up. I bet Adobe upper management feels very smug as they cash their bonus checks. 

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

The last Adobe book I bought was the Postscript red reference, around 1992.

I needed several reference/tutorial boat anchors for various iterations of MS Office.

Just sayin'.

[rob day]

All you have to do is search InDesign your subject helpX—the helpx web manual is comprehensive and current.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I can't remember the last time I searched "InDesign [topic]" and didn't get both relevant Adobe pages and good second-source information — often a bit too complete and detailed for my needs, so that I had to skim down to the needed part.

I am honestly a bit baffled at the OP's claims — but it's a vastly complex app and there isn't always a one-stop solution to every project need.

[rob day]

didn't get both relevant Adobe pages

Right, helpx in the URL indicates the official Adobe documentation:

[Mike Witherell]

I've got to agree with you a little bit: I wish the help files had more detail. I wish they had a paragraph or two describing the concept and purpose of a feature.

<humor>In the meantime, you might also consider listening to less Pink Floyd, and more upbeat music.

<Cheerful Music> </humor>

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

@Mike Witherell No Floyd?! How about Rage Against the Machine?

[Derek Cross]

The OP has had his rant but doesn't seem any further forward, if he's still around perhaps he could share with us which version of InDesign and OS and details the issues he's having. I'm sure someone on here will be able to sort it out in a trice. (Hostage to fortune!)

[AlanGilbertson]

My sense is that the OP has never done any InDesign training, online or in-person. He is missing a lot of basic understanding and has difficulty finding answers due to not asking the right questions or not understanding the context of the answers. That can build up a huge amount of frustration, and the tendency is to lash out, which is never productive.

I see this a lot with Office users who dive in and try to use Excel or Word (or Windows, for that matter) without taking a class or putting in time learning the basics. You're not going to debug someone's spreadsheet problem if they don't know what a cell is. It's amazine how everything calms down when you supply the missing fundamentals that are making all the rest incomprehensible but that weren't even in the original question.

Rants and distemper always stem from not understanding something more basic than whatever the person thinks they're having trouble with. Rants are irrational. Consider the OP asserting that support went downhill "suspiciously right after Adobe went public," despite the fact that was in 1986, two years before Illustrator, four years before Photoshop, 14 years before InDesign, and probably before the OP was born.

No one ever learned how to use an industrial-grade app from a user manual: that would be like trying to learn a foreign language from a dictionary. That's why there are college courses in AutoCAD, Maya, Solidworks, AVID, and Creative Cloud. It's why Peachpit and O'Reilly and SkillShare and LinkedIn Learning exist, and why YouTube is awash with "how to" videos of variable quality. 

Mobile apps have created a false expecation that anyone can learn professional software without having to study it, and a lot of people have believed it. There is no substitute for online training or a classroom course. Then you can find answers because you know where to look.

[ronk15270403]

“ …you can find answers because you know where to look.”



I’ve been “studying” InDesign since it was Pagemaker.  Attended the User Group. Subscribed to the InDesign newsletter which is now Creative Pro and read every word of it monthly. Faithfully listen to the podcasts. Sought out SkillShare courses on InDesign. No, I clearly don’t have “the false expectation that anyone can learn professional software without having to study it.” I think I have been.  Since InDesign 1.x

My “rants and distemper*” stem from more than not understanding.  And they are not that; they are observations that Adobe was at a crossroads around public offering time in ‘86.  They could have respected their customer or they could have enriched their new stockholders.  Or as success engulfed them, made a genuine commitment to helping their users.

I read your comment about industrial grade app needing a college course. My 3D friend who uses Maya daily and occasionally AutoCAD pointed out that he can still reach a English-speaking support person.  College course optional .

You make well-reasoned Korporate Talking Points.  But they are just that.  So much for the ole college course try.

*distemper is a disease found in mammals. I am critical of Adobe Indesign support but I am not foaming at the mouth.

 [abuse removed by moderator]

[BobLevine]

InDesign was never Pagemaker. 

[Dave Creamer of IDEAS]

@ronk15270403 Keep your racist comments to yourself.

[Derek Cross]

I think this the OP doesn't want any help he just wants to rant. The thread is not serving any useful purpose, I suggest we close it.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Yes, extensive rants against total awfulness, doubled down when challenged, and complete exclusion of any "You know, some of this might be me" factors, with any contradictory reply tagged as that of a corporate shill... not even amusing any more.

I refer the OP to Affinity and say let's move on.

And suggest that anyone with this degree of frustration simply ask for help here instead of being furious an Adobe support person didn't move into their house to tutor them.

And note that Maya and AutoCAD are, each, around five times the cost of Creative Cloud and, arguably, do far narrower ranges of task. But that's neither here nor there.

[Mike Witherell]

Did you guys know that distemper is very common in Quebec? I didn't know that.