"Life it too short to read the manual"

[brickviking]

How much of a manual I read varies; depending on the product, I'll often dive in to the obvious stuff, and use the manual to fact-check for stuff I'm not sure about. I generally remember obvious stuff and features I use more often, but for stuff I don't know, I often need to revisit the manual multiple times until it 'locks'. I have in the past made use of forums and IRC (Internet Chat Relay) channels for questions not explained in "one phrase", though those are prone to "I have to wait ages for a response, if there's a 'correct' response at all". With the calculators I have, I tend to read more of the manual, mainly because I need to look up how to do more complicated stuff than just add/subtract/sin/sqrt/log.

The quality of the manuals supplied with my calculators have varied from fairly good (82MS, 9750g+) to minimal (HP50G's QRG, 9750gII's 16-page quick start guide) to abysmal (Canon's F-804P). The last one's particularly interesting in that every button on the calculator's explained, but the English translation is ... lousy. Here's an example of the [ON/C] button's description:

Quote:Turn on power, cleaning up / cleaning independent memory / cleaning statistic memory

Push it down to open power source if the electric source is closed.
Push it down to clean up the input characters and wrong identifiers.
Push down [SHIFT] first and then this key to clean up the contents in the independent memory.
Push down [ALPHA] first and then this key to clean up the statistic computational registers (statistic comprtional mode).

And yes, that spelling mistake really is in the manual. It's really a shame, because the logic portion of this particular calculator is quite good, even considering that it's not actually programmable. I can store variable-based formulae in it up to a certain limit, and I have 27 variables available as well as a separate memory register and answer register. It's just seriously let down by the manual, and it's also let down by the buttons and fascia. I gave a quick breakdown about it and others at this blog post of mine from 2008.

As for the study, I got lost once they started discussing the specifics of the statistics they applied to the data. I would have actually liked to see a questionnaire, rather than just the results of that questionnaire. Given that I've found that maths is actually a weak point for me, I wasn't entirely surprised, but I was disappointed.

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