The information is already there for’um!

The computer. It’s what you’re reading this blog post on. It’s where you go to talk to friends, family and work colleagues over various platforms. It’s where work can be done. Needless to say, if you’re adept enough to have found my blog, the computer is a part of your everyday life, and perhaps it even dominates your life. But where do you go when you have small issues, computer based or not?

Since I have started university, and even before; I have been considered to be someone above average on the computer. I am not a genius by any stretch, I just know what I feel I need to in order to make my computer make my life an easier and more entertaining one. People think I’m a computer whizz, but the truth is, when you’re on the phone to me, talking to me online or even sitting right beside me and you ask me a computer related question (generally software), if I don’t know the answer to your question, I’ll still be able to give the information required in a very short space of time – often seamlessly. How do I come across as if I already know your answer?

This is going to sound like a primary school I.T. session for a few sentences, but bear with me, because if you know the fundamentals and apply them, your life’s issues can be resolved in a streamlined way. Search engines, don’t underestimate them. Also, don’t neglect the fact that there’s probably other people who have faced the same issue as you are. You put those together and what do you get? A query that can be typed out and inputted into a search engine.

Forums swarm the internet; they’re absolutely everywhere and cover topics from how to create superscript text in Excel, to where to buy the best bananas. My point is, you’re not alone. And if you ask one singular person, the chances they have the information you require compared to the millions of people that use help forums is vast. What you ask doesn’t have to be too specific, just type the sentence into a search engine and trust that someone else has typed something similar before, and has yielded a result. For example, I am currently leading the design part of a A0 size project poster based on a hypothetical reservoir being created in Edale, Peak District. I opened up Adobe InDesign, placed my Adobe Illustrator file which had the base map for the reservoir and other miscellaneous vector paths, and I noticed that the file placed into InDesign looked terribly pixelated. Worried that I had somehow done something wrong, I deleted the placed file and tried again. Yet, again, the image quality was of a poor standard. So, at this point, I turned to the internet. I typed in “image of high resolution pixelating in InDesign cs5”. Voila! The first page listed had my answer; it turns out Adobe Indesign is set by preset to low graphic standards.

You see, what I’m trying to do here is to help those not fully aware, that a search engine is a truly powerful tool which can be used in many situations of difficulty, despair and confusion. I would post in forums, but I hope that advice posts such as this can be just as easily found.

Happy searching. Happy solving. Happy Jordan.