# Sources of Help

This manual is the most complete source of explanation for &gnum; and attempts to describe as much of the program as possible. However, this manual cannot answer all the possible questions readers may have: the manual is not yet finished and there are many situations which cannot be explained through a manual. Other sources of information which might be helpful to &gnum; users are presented below.

Several of the sources of information below involve talking directly with the people who have created &gnum;. These people are volunteers who have spend several years working on the program to make it useful. They will all be glad to help you but only if they decide they want to. They are all busy and only volunteer on this project. You can take several steps to make these people want to help you.

First of all, try to help yourself by reading the existing documents. If you have read the documents, others will be much more likely to want to answer any questions that remain. Secondly, be polite by introducing yourself, thanking developers for their hard work and asking your questions nicely. Please be aware that the developers all respect each other and their users so therefore, while their answers may appear brisk or discourteous, they are simply trying to be efficient and save time by being curt. Please assume they respect you and want to help you, after all they have written a program for you to use.

Steps for getting help.

- Read the Manual:

  First, please look carefully through this manual to see if you can answer your own question. This can be hard and requires careful thinking but will teach you the most.

- Read the Web Site:

  Second, look at the &gnum; web site, look on the world wide web for explanations using other spreadsheets or look for a book on how to use another spreadsheet. sect-morehelp-web explains how to access and find information on the web site.

- Read other Spreadsheet Tutorials:

  Another useful source of help is the literature written for other spreadsheets. &gnum; is quite similar to a number of other spreadsheets and often books, web sites, tutorials and other documents which describe how to use other spreadsheets can help users understand how to use &gnum;. sect-morehelp-books describes other spreadsheets for which usage manuals may provide useful information.

- Send email to the Gnumeric List:

  The &gnum; project maintains an email mailing list which is a way for people to send email to all the core developers. sect-morehelp-maillist explains how to send email to the gnumeric list and how to read past messages including questions and answers which may be helpful.

- Join the Chat Discussion:

  The &gnum; project also uses an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel, also known as a `discussion room', in which developers talk to each other, and to anyone else, about the program. sect-morehelp-irc explains how to join this discussion.

## Web Resources

The &gnum; project maintains a web site with explanations, links and other useful information to learn about and use this spreadsheet.

## The Gnumeric Web Site

The &gnum; web site can be accessed by clicking on this link. Alternatively, it may be necessary to enter the address directly into a web browser. The &gnum; project page address is:

    http://www.gnome.org/projects/gnumeric/

It may be necessary to copy the text and paste it into the address field.

## Related Manuals

&gnum; strives to mimic the behaviour of other spreadsheets so books which explain how to use these other spreadsheets will probably be useful to help understand &gnum;.

The OpenOffice.org spreadsheet named Calc is another popular and highly functional spreadsheet which provides users with the freedoms provided by &gnum; including the freedom to access and use the source code of the program itself. The documentation for Calc may also help explain how to use &gnum; and can be accessed through the OpenOffice.org web site at http://www.openoffice.org/ .

The manuals for other spreadsheets, even those that restrict users freedoms in several ways, may help to explain how to use &gnum;. &gnum; attempts explicitly to behave in a manner understandable to users of the Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Because Excel has a very large number of users, many books have been written explaining how to use that spreadsheet. Any local bookstore should have at least a few of these books which may help answer any questions.

## The Mailing List

The &gnum; project maintains a mailing list which is a system by which people can send one email which gets distributed to everyone who has signed up to read these emails. Please understand that this list is used for serious discussions about developing this spreadsheet further. Questions from users are generally answered when posted to this list but simple questions which are answered in the manual may generate the simple answer, "Please read the manual." Also, developers volunteer any time they take to answer your questions so please be polite.

The best way to use this resource is first to read the archives for the past few months to see if any of the subjects look similar to the issue which interests you. It may be that your question has just been asked by someone else and a good answer has been posted. To access the archives, use a web browser to go to the mailing list web page at http://www.gnome.org/ and then ...

If none of the emails recently posted to the mailing list address your issue, if you would like clarification to an earlier answer, or if you simply want to thank the developers, you are welcome to send an email of your own to the list. This simply requires writing an email and sending it to

    gnumeric-list@gnome.org

and your posting will eventually get sent to everyone who is subscribed to the list. Please select the subject of your email carefully to make it easy for everyone to see if they are interested in reading and possibly answering your message. For example, the subject "I need help" may be true but is ineffective; a better subject would be "Help needed with statistical regression". Please make it easy for others to give you help.

After you have sent your email, there may be an initial delay while the moderator of the list, a person who acts as editor, reviews your email to see if it is relevant to the discussion. This step is required to limit the junk email that gets sent out to everyone.

Very rarely an email might automatically be discarded if it appeared to be a mass junk mailing. If, after a few days, your email does not appear in the archives and you don't get any response, then re-send your email to the list omitting any signatures or other material that might appear to be commercial solicitation. A simple, text message is the least likely to be discarded by these automatic tools.

Once your email is sent to everyone on the list, someone may answer you. They may choose to answer you directly, to post a response to the list, or to do both. In the hours and days after posting, you can check to see if you received email and check the list archives, as is explained above, to see if someone answered there.

## Internet Chat (IRC)

The GNOME and GIMP projects maintain a series of servers to provide a world wide network enabling an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) system for discussion on issues related to those projects including a discussion channel dedicated to &gnum;. This is a system by which people can communicate directly with each other by typing lines into an IRC client which are then broadcast to everyone listening in a particular channel. Unfortunately this manual cannot provide a full explanation for how to obtain, install and use an IRC client. There are a number of such programs available, many of which provide users all the freedoms which &gnum; provides and instructions for these can be obtained from the world wide web. More information and access to such software can easily be obtained by running a search in any world wide web search engine for "IRC" and "client" and the name of the operating system of the machine which will run the software.

The &gnum; IRC discussion channel is named `#gnumeric` (although the number symbol, #, may not be needed) and is hosted on the series of servers called `GIMPnet`. The best way to connect to GIMPnet is using the IRC server `irc.gimp.org`. That hostname points to a variety of different servers in the United States. If you live elsewhere, after you are connected you can use the chat command `/links` to find a server which is closer on the internet to your location.

If you decide to join the discussion, please be polite, post a question or comment and be prepared to wait a little bit for someone to address you. Several of the developers are permanently connected to the channel and check every half hour or so to see if anyone has asked a question but are working on something else in the meantime. Your question may be answered right away but asking questions using the mailing list may prove to be more efficient since it would not require paying attention to the IRC channel discussion, even if it ultimately requires longer to obtain an answer.