Please make a user manual / user guide available online
Why isn't there a functional and useful user manual or user guide available online?
The lack of issuing any type of user guide is a huge missed opportunity. It seems this task has been Offloaded to the Adobe community. Adobe used to consider its customers/clients ones who deserved professional, well-organized, easy-to-use, comprehensive instructions and guides. Whatever happened to supporting those who put/keep you in business? I guess in the software business that's progress ...?
In today's digital/virtual world, it would be exceptionally easy to produce, share and update useful and robust supporting content. The current offering of tutorials is so basic, they're practically useless.
Thank you,
Dave
Anonymous
shared this idea
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Dave, I changed my mind on the quality of helpx pages through these years. They become less and less useful and more and more truncated.
The team was notified on the topic and I hope them agreeing something is off would bear fruit.
Please share this report among those who are troubled with the same thing — we need their votes to make it more important. Teacher, educators, enthusiasts... -
Egor/ADMIN,
I would have to agree- but stress the "SORT OF" part of your comment. Those at best could be referred to as partial, sometimes random tips. I find them narrow and shallow- only touching on the basic use cases. If someone wanted to truly understand the tool, even just to a moderate level … it's simple just not there. Again- the "buck" get passed off to the community. And results stumble in across days, weeks, months, years +. I don't see how that could be considered any form reasonable service. Excuse my abruptness but it's truly sad … and even exploitive. -
Margaret Trauth
commented
There used to be a great book that came in a box along with the CD of the program. Most of the mass of the box you bought at the store was the manual.
A lot of that book used to be online in the help section.
But it's been vanishing, and so much of how this program works only lives in archive.org and in the heads of people like me who've been using it for a couple of decades. It's pretty absurd.
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Jess Telmanik
commented
HelpX continues to reliably decline in helping anyone, and the recent "updates" are lacking. The Discover Panel has potential but still feels neglected.
Since Adobe is ALL about AI and how much “easier” it makes everything. Why not simply use AI to create and provide users with helpful detailed documentation?
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Tim Tackenberg commented
Going to chime in to this. To me, it is just crazy that a piece of professional software in this price range comes without any kind of manual! Literally jaw dropping... How can this not exist?
The Help pages are just not helpful at all for a somewhat experienced user that just wants to know -for example- how a particular effect works. And to add injury to insult, the freaking chatbot that is provided there, will drive you close to throwing your laptop out the window in a matter of minutes. The whole Help pages just seems geared towards getting me to try new features, try to generate something using AI, or getting me another subscription. No actual valuable information to be found.
Adobe should have a look at CAD programs like Solidworks or any Autodesk program, which just offer built in information and comprehensive websites detailing the functions of their programs.
If I were paying for my subscription myself, this would be reason for me to move to the competition!
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Dave, a manual is sort of there already.
There is the Discover panel, which is basically a browser window with some search and in-app highlighting, and there is the site it picks data from, helpx.adobe.com/illustrator/
I can’t say these are perfect (cause I know they are not) — but maybe a little more details, please? What is that you think is not covered well enough by it?
