Participant

Question

Indesign Help is worst than no help.

Forum|Forum|1 year ago
August 28, 2024
6 replies
2285 views

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.

Performance

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Mike Witherell

Community Expert

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

Mike Witherell

Derek Cross

Community Expert

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

Community Expert

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.

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ronk15270403Author

Participant

“ …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]

Mike Witherell

Community Expert

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.

Mike Witherell

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

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

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

Barb Binder

Community Expert

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

~Barb at Rocky Mountain Training

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ronk15270403Author

Participant

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

Legend

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.

Dave Creamer of IDEAS

Community Expert

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.

David Creamer: Community Expert (ACI and ACE 1995-2023)

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Manan Joshi

Community Expert

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