Articles tagged with: 'guide'

The Pragmatic Computer User's Guide is dedicated to simplifying your computer work. It will show you how to be master of your computer, use the Internet efficiently, and write great looking text and spreadsheet documents. You're a busy person, and you want to keep the amount of time you spend with the computer to a minimum, or perhaps you use the computer a lot, and you want to become more proficient. Either way, this guide can help you – quickly, and pragmatically.

The Internet is probably the largest academic and commercial collaboration in history. It provides numerous sources of information and means of communication.

This section of the guide concentrates on the programs that you will need to make the best use of the resources that the Internet provides.

These resources are provided by servers using protocols which can be accessed by client programs on your computer.

This is probably the most important section of the guide, because writing documents, spreadsheets, and occasionally presentations or databases, forms a consistent and considerable part of the working day.

The choice of office suite, and other office type applications, together with the knowledge you have in using them, is one of the most important factors dictating how much, or how little time you will spend at your computer.

The guide has taken considerable care in choosing a small set of programs which provide suitable functionality, together with a pragmatic approach to using them.

Utility software is a broad ranging section of the guide, dedicated to a small group of useful programs which you don't always need for everyday work, or that are useful supplementary software to the programs that you do use frequently.

The utility programs are usually small in size, and simple to understand and use, primarily because they focus on one specific task, such as file archiving.

Apart from advising you on choosing from the enormous amount of software available, and showing you how to install, and uninstall the software, the guide also provides pragmatic information on using the programs.

The goal of these tutorials is to provide you with just enough knowledge to make you reasonably competent in the shortest time. They also serve as a basis to become proficient in using one or more of the programs, should you wish to invest further time on them, by offering pointers to more detailed information available on the Internet.

The Pragmatic Computer User's Guide is written and maintained by a small dedicated team. The objectives are straightforward – provide the best possible introduction to some of the best software in the world.

The guide's authors try to do most of the time consuming tasks for you. They install, and uninstall the software, taking screenshots as they go, so that you'll know exactly what you'll have to do. Then they analyse the software, and pick out the most important points, checking existing documentation, and trying out the programs.

This section details the most important changes in the guide since the last published version. New versions will become available when sufficient current articles are updated, or new articles are added.

As this is the first public appearance of the Pragmatic Computer User's Guide, everything is new. This page will be updated when existing articles are updated, or new articles are added.

This guide is a commercial enterprise. Although the entire contents is freely available on the Internet, ...