Hi Claire,
First, welcome to the documentation team and to say your input and
contribution as a technical author will be greatly appreciated.
If I may, I would like to offer a couple of tips and pointers. Although
I am replying to your first post of the 29th. I will be responding to
your 3 subsequent posts on that date.
Joining the team meetings is a good thing but not critical, Jean Weber
who you probably know from OpenOffice.org days is still one of our top
contributors, but the meeting time is not convenient for her Australian
time zone. Likewise, the new USA East Coast meeting time is the early
hours of the morning in my time zone, so I can never attend.
In your 3 subsequent posts you refer to attachments. The TDF have not
moved into the modern world and dictate a PLAIN TEXT ONLY posts and NO
ATTACHMENTS policy. Thankfully, they have allowed us to create
documentation with a word processor, rather than a quill pen and parchment.
You say you have downloaded the "Latest" version of the software, which
suggests you have either version 6.2.3 or 6.1.5 and you are comparing
against the Getting Started User Guide documentation contributed for
version 6.0.2
Your review of the published documentation is appreciated, but at the
present time no provision exists to either quickly update published
documents, or to record these reviews for consideration/inclusion in the
next revision of the guide(s). I will be submitting a proposal to the
next team meeting to set up a provision to utilize these "Your
Documentation Is Wrong" inputs for the benefit of contributors who take
on the revision of the User Guides in future.
In your 3 subsequent posts you refer to items being out of date, or not
appearing in your version of the software. Considering the speed of
development/updating of the software, being out of date is almost a
given. In the case of the Getting Started Guide for V6 we attempted an
experiment to speed up the development of that guide, which resulted in
a mixture of OS captures and inconsistent styling.
As a team we are mow concentrating on revising/updating the Calc User
Guide (the most demanded of all our published guides) and this is where
I feel you could make a useful contribution. If Olivier has not already
done so, I ask him now to create an "Own Cloud" account for you, so that
you can become actively involved in the guides revision/update/review
process.
As a starting point you might wish to grab and review one of the Calc
chapters Jean revised/updated, or if you have masochistic tendencies
you could review my revision of Chapter 2. In any case keep in mind that
this guide is for version 6.0, not 6.1 or 6.2. There are a number of
methods by which you can have more than one version of the software
installed or available.
No matter how much time you can spare to contribute, please stay active
by asking questions, making suggestions/recommendations/proposals on
this list.
Best Regards and Good Luck with Job Hunting.
Dave