Tracking contribution to Access forums and newsgroups.

[Office Question]

For the regular posters/followers of MS Access forums and newsgroups,

Is it of value to you to track your contribution to the newsgroup (in
terms of the number of successful questions answered, questions asked,
etc.) for reference in business settings?

For example: In a job interview, would you ever point to your
contribution on a newsgroup or website as a demonstration of your
knowledge and expertise in MS Office applications - letting your
reputation within the newsgroup community speak to your credibility as
a knowledgeable resource?

Would you consider a reputation system, like the one at http://officequestions.com
to be an asset on a resume?

Thanks for your thoughts.

 

[Arvin Meyer [MVP]]

Those of us who are MVPs have been awarded that honor by Microsoft. Most of
us keep track of our newsgroups posting and postings on listservers as well.

Those few who answer questions on web forums have their stats available from
the forum owner.

I cannot say whether or not any tracking of my answers is worthwhile, but
searching on "Arvin Meyer" in Bing or Google brings many thousands of hits,
and anyone interested can easily follow up. I don't think the quantity of
questions answered is as much an indicator as the quality of those answers.

 

[Office Question]

Thanks for your responses. I see your point Arvin, and appreciate
your perspective.

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

For the regular posters/followers of MS Access forums and newsgroups,

1) This appears to be identical to the StackOverflow site. Is this
run by the same people? That is Joel Spolsky and crew?

If so why is the Contact Us not present?

Where is the following information which is present on StackOverflow?
"user contributed content licensed under cc-wiki with attribution
required"

Why does the Legal Stuff page state "contact lawyer and put more stuff
here if needed. "

Hmm, I think an email off to Joel would be a good idea.

2) This question could be construed as a thinly veiled advertisement
for that website. Which presumably makes money from selling ads.
Although I don't see any such.

Would you consider a reputation system, like the one at http://officequestions.com
to be an asset on a resume?

Presumably it would be useful for those relative few who have
significant reputations, that is greater than, just picking a number,
1000 points.

Why are you using a gmail address and not an email address from that
website?

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[John... Visio MVP]

I have built a very successful business providing basic help with Access,
Excel and Word applications for a very reasonable fee. A large percentage
of the projects I have worked on came from people who saw my posts in the
newsgroups. Below is one of the numerous customer comments I have received.

Steve
(e-mail address removed)

One word: Wow.

I had no clue it could be such an "aesthetically pleasing" interface. I
figured it'd just be a big chart. That's amazing. You've really helped
me cause out a lot, and you've done a tremendous job with this demo.
With this, I can more easily explain how a database could help us out.

Thanks,

Will Gillespie

Did you actually get Will's permission to quote him?


These newsgroups are provided by Microsoft for FREE peer to peer support.
There are many highly qualified individuals who gladly help for free. Stevie
is not one of them, but he is the only one who just does not get the idea of
"FREE" support. He offers questionable results at unreasonable prices. If he
was any good, the "thousands" of people he claims to have helped would be
flooding him with work, but there appears to be a continuous drought and he
needs to constantly grovel for work.

A few gems gleaned from the Word New User newsgroup over the past Christmas
period and a few gems from the Access newsgroups to show Stevie's
"expertise".


Dec 17, 2008 7:47 pm

Word 2007 ..........
In older versions of Word you could highlght some text then go to Format -
Change Case and change the case of the hoghloghted text. Is this still
available in Word 2007? Where?
Thanks! Steve


Dec 22, 2008 8:22 pm

I am designing a series of paystubs for a client. I start in landscape and
draw a table then add columns and rows to setup labels and their
corresponding value. This all works fine. After a landscape version is
completed, I next need to design a portrait version. Rather than strating
from scratch, I'd like to be able to cut and paste from the landscape
version and design the portrait version.
Steve


Dec 24, 2008, 1:12 PM

How do you protect the document for filling in forms?
Steve


One of my favourites:
Dec 30, 2008 8:07 PM - a reply to stevie
(The original poster asked how to sort a list and stevie offered to create
the OP an Access database)

Yes, you are right but a database is the correct tool to use not a
spreadsheet.

Not at all. If it's just a simple list then a spreadsheet is perfectly
adequate...


Sept 10, 2009
(In respose to a perfectly adequate GENERIC solution stevie wrote)

This function is specific to the example but not generic for any amount paid
out.

Steve



Sept 9, 2009

you can then return all the characters in front of it with the Left()
fumction. Would look like:
Left("YourString",Instr("YourString","VbCr" Or "VbLf") - 1)

Steve

No, it would not look like

Left("YourString",Instr("YourString","VbCr" Or "VbLf") - 1)

First of all, the constants are vbCr and vbLf: no quotes around them. With
the quotes, you're looking for the literal strings.

Second, you can't Or together character constants like that. Even if you
could, Or'ing them together in the InStr function like that makes no sense
at all.



Sept 22,2009
Sorry Steve, even I can see that this is a useless answer. I made it pretty
clear that "CW259" is just ONE possible value for the control.

Hello David,

Open your report in design view and select txtOrderID. Open properties and
go to the Data tab. Put the following expression in the Control Source
property:

=IIF([chkActive],"CW259","(CW259)")

Steve

John... Visio MVP

 

[Tom van Stiphout]

On Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:10:08 -0700 (PDT), Office Question

I have a steady job (between you and me - I'm sleeping with the
president), but if I was looking for another job, for sure I would
mention my work in the newsgroups.
The score in a reputation system wouldn't mean much to me, because
IMHO they are still quite immature and not sufficiently reflective of
the value of the responses. "I got a 4.7 on somewhere.com" would NOT
be on my resume. Rather I would hope that the hiring manager was
competent enough to discuss my qualifications as well as my online
postings. I always use the same persona in doing so, so googling (or
binging) my name would easily reveal my contributions.

-Tom.
Microsoft Access MVP

 

[Mark Andrews]

If I went to a job interview I don't think I my newsgroup contributions
would up. I contribute where I can when I can solely to help others.
Perhaps if I was applying for a training position or something of that
nature newsgroups might be a topic in the interview? Only if the topic of
newsgroups happened to come up in the interview would anything be mentioned.

However, I wouldn't mind seeing how many questions I have answered.

Also you should probably come up with better ways to advertise
officequestions.com.

My two cents,
Mark

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

1) This appears to be identical to the StackOverflow site. Is this
run by the same people? That is Joel Spolsky and crew?

The owner is licensing the StackOverflow engine from Joel and crew.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/list-of-stackexchange-sites

I'd heard that Joel was thinking of doing such but didn't realize it
was already happening.

We'll have to keep checking that site to see if Steve Santos is
posting any advertisements.

Also I prefer answering complex developer type questions or problems.
I don't do end user questions very much. Just a matter of personal
preference. So I'll stick with StackOverflow, the MS newsgroups and
cdma.

MVPs who answer a lot of beginner type questions would probably like
working on that site a lot more.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[David W. Fenton]

The score in a reputation system wouldn't mean much to me, because
IMHO they are still quite immature and not sufficiently reflective
of the value of the responses. "I got a 4.7 on somewhere.com"
would NOT be on my resume. Rather I would hope that the hiring
manager was competent enough to discuss my qualifications as well
as my online postings. I always use the same persona in doing so,
so googling (or binging) my name would easily reveal my
contributions.

There are also problems with voting-based reputation systems, in
that the votes can be gamed.

And a site like StackOverflow has its own problems in that people
with sufficient reputation can edit the posts of others, which means
that a post that is supposedly authored by one person might have
several authors. Yet, the original author gets credit for the votes,
even if the article no longer says what the original author
intended.

I recently had a big fight over someone editing one of my posts to
say something completely different from what I'd posted -- I rolled
back his edits, and then he put them back in, I rolled them back,
and so forth. He claims I'm going against the spirit of
collaboration/Wiki that SO is supposed to be about, but that only
works when the edits actually *improve* the content. His edits were
making my post less informative, and, indeed, completely wrong. I
told him he should make his own post with his own answer instead of
trying to hijack mine. He then created an answer under his own login
and pasted the content of my post with his changes (which consisted
of an opening paragraph that was WRONG) and then added in selections
from things I'd written in the comment description.

There's no getting around this kind of problem because there is an
endless supply of assholes out there who cannot be convinced to
behave responsibly. But it certainly made me think that SO's
potential was never going to be realized because it has
contradictory goals -- it wants to encourage collaboration, but it
still tracks individual reputation. You can't do both of those
unless you track reputation at a level more granular than the single
post.

 

[David W. Fenton]

The owner is licensing the StackOverflow engine from Joel and
crew.
http://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/4/list-of-stackexchange-sit
es

I'd heard that Joel was thinking of doing such but didn't realize
it was already happening.

I didn't realize my comments in reply to Tom were so on point -- I
wasn't about to go to the site and check because it as an obvious
advertisement and I'm not going to reward an advertiser with hits on
their site.

The StackOverflow reputation system is flawed in that you can't
control the content of your own posts. Thus, the reputation numbers
you have don't necessarily derive from your own contributions.

We'll have to keep checking that site to see if Steve Santos is
posting any advertisements.

Also I prefer answering complex developer type questions or
problems. I don't do end user questions very much. Just a matter
of personal preference. So I'll stick with StackOverflow, the MS
newsgroups and cdma.

There's also SuperUser.com for end user questions, though there's a
certain hostility developing on StackOverflow.com towards all Access
questions, with people saying that they aren't programming questions
and belong on SuperUser.com.

There's also ServerFault.com, but I can't quite figure out its
reason for existence -- I haven't yet found anything useful there.

MVPs who answer a lot of beginner type questions would probably
like working on that site a lot more.

Or SuperUser.com, for a site that is run by the originators of the
platform.

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

There's also SuperUser.com for end user questions, though there's a
certain hostility developing on StackOverflow.com towards all Access
questions, with people saying that they aren't programming questions
and belong on SuperUser.com.

I recall a few comments along those lines but I don't recall
challenging them. I'll have to ensure I do so in the future. Seems
to me though that most Access questions on SO are indeed dev type
questions. Not the same as on the MS forums of course.

Or SuperUser.com, for a site that is run by the originators of the
platform.

Good point.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

there's a
certain hostility developing on StackOverflow.com towards all Access
questions,

After a few of us were rebuking posters FUD about the multi user
capabilities of Access I've noticed that

1) Those comments aren't expressed much any more

2) One person whined about how he thought some of us were whining
about such comments. hehehehe

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

I didn't realize my comments in reply to Tom were so on point

Interesting. Your posting didn't make it to MS news server although I'm seeing it on
my ISPs news server.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[David W. Fenton]

I recall a few comments along those lines but I don't recall
challenging them. I'll have to ensure I do so in the future.
Seems to me though that most Access questions on SO are indeed dev
type questions. Not the same as on the MS forums of course.

An Access question about point-and-click user interface creation is
a programming question, in my opinion. In other environments to get
the same result, you'd have to write code, but in Access you don't
have to. You're still creating an application -- you're just not
pounding code to do it.

 

[David W. Fenton]

After a few of us were rebuking posters FUD about the multi user
capabilities of Access I've noticed that

1) Those comments aren't expressed much any more

2) One person whined about how he thought some of us were whining
about such comments. hehehehe

I was holding my own for several months before you and Albert showed
up. Once there were three strong voices, as well as a number of
non-Access types who had common sense who started speaking up in
favor of Access, it settled down. But if you look back to the kinds
of crap that I had to respond to back when I started posting in
September a year ago, you'd think I wouldn't have had the energy.

The Access bigotry still occasionally pops up, but now it's met with
immediate pushback from more than one poster -- I often don't have
to post anything any more in these threads. It has reduced the slope
in the rise of my reputation, since I don't have to post as much, so
my answeres don't get voted up as often.

Also, there's two or three others who are real Access experts that
I've never seen in the newsgroups who are posting. One of those is
kind of dodgy, though -- I often find myself posting comments in
response to his posts questioning what he said, and then he edits
his post to fix the problem. I think that's an excellent feature of
the site, actually, and I'd rather post a comment and let the
original poster fix it than fix it myself (even though I've got
reputation enough to do so).

 

[david]

For what it's worth, there was a business that measured
this several (many) years ago. The found (and documented)
that they got no new leads and no new business from
their contribution. They concluded that (a) contributing
to the Access news groups was not an effective way to
build business, and (b) that people who were contributing
to the Access news groups were not in it for the money.

Long time ago. Sorry, don't have a URL.

(david)

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

I was holding my own for several months before you and Albert showed
up. Once there were three strong voices, as well as a number of
non-Access types who had common sense who started speaking up in
favor of Access, it settled down. But if you look back to the kinds
of crap that I had to respond to back when I started posting in
September a year ago, you'd think I wouldn't have had the energy.

I was poking about way back when, mostly in the most upvoted
questions, and was rather startled at the crap. Good on you.

The Access bigotry still occasionally pops up, but now it's met with
immediate pushback from more than one poster -- I often don't have
to post anything any more in these threads. It has reduced the slope
in the rise of my reputation, since I don't have to post as much, so
my answeres don't get voted up as often.

Well, FWIW whenever I see one of your postings I agree with I do award
you the points. I think though that I've downvoted more postings (not
yours of course) than I've upvoted postings. No, not quite but
close.

Also, there's two or three others who are real Access experts that
I've never seen in the newsgroups who are posting. One of those is
kind of dodgy, though -- I often find myself posting comments in
response to his posts questioning what he said, and then he edits
his post to fix the problem. I think that's an excellent feature of
the site, actually, and I'd rather post a comment and let the
original poster fix it than fix it myself (even though I've got
reputation enough to do so).

It's quite confusing though to read someone's comment and look back at
the posting and wonder why the posting agrees with the comment. Then
you realize he edited it.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[David W. Fenton]

I was poking about way back when, mostly in the most upvoted
questions, and was rather startled at the crap. Good on you.

Well, it was kind of entertaining for a while. Not so much any
longer. I used to enjoy going there when I was in a bad mood.

Well, FWIW whenever I see one of your postings I agree with I do
award you the points.

Thanks for that. I try to upvote yours, too -- I want to make sure
posts by the people who know what they are talking about float to
the top.

I think though that I've downvoted more postings (not
yours of course) than I've upvoted postings. No, not quite but
close.

I'm way more negative than positive, with 197 UP and 262 DOWN.

It seems that bad advice proliferates. If the first answer is bad,
it causes the idiots to chime in with more bad adviced, so when I
encounter a thread after it's already gotten started down this bad
path, not only do I comment on each wrong post and add my own
corrective answer (if necessary -- you or Albert often get there
first, as well as any other other half dozen respectable Access
gurus on the site), I also make sure to vote down every bad answer.

This article is one that demonstrates that the system *almost*
works:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/29044/good-free-alternative-to-ms-
access

The accepted answer has a lower score (33) than the best answer
(43). I posted my own answer over a year ago and it still gets
upvotes on a regular basis -- can't imagine why!

It's quite confusing though to read someone's comment and look
back at the posting and wonder why the posting agrees with the
comment. Then you realize he edited it.

Exactly. I think it's a pretty problematic system. It lacks the
consistency and trackability of a Wiki while attempting to replicate
the same informational process.

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

Well, FWIW whenever I see one of your postings I agree with I do award
you the points.

I should add that I've found next to no postings of yours that I
disagreed with.

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/

 

[Tony Toews [MVP]]

Well, it was kind of entertaining for a while. Not so much any
longer. I used to enjoy going there when I was in a bad mood.

HAHAHAHAHA (10 minutes later) Still grinning.

I'm way more negative than positive, with 197 UP and 262 DOWN.

It seems that bad advice proliferates. If the first answer is bad,
it causes the idiots to chime in with more bad adviced, so when I
encounter a thread after it's already gotten started down this bad
path, not only do I comment on each wrong post and add my own
corrective answer (if necessary -- you or Albert often get there
first, as well as any other other half dozen respectable Access
gurus on the site), I also make sure to vote down every bad answer.

Yup, I vote them down too.

Exactly. I think it's a pretty problematic system. It lacks the
consistency and trackability of a Wiki while attempting to replicate
the same informational process.

That onedaywhen person edited one of my postings to include a
suggestion I thought was quite idiotic. However I didn't notice that
he had edited it for quite some time and while I was debating with
myself how to rebutt his edit it has not scrolled of my this
month!last month screen so I can't easily find it.

I think what I would do now is take his edits into a separate
paragraph with a bold comment "So and so states" ...... Then I'd
respond "however I totally disagree ...."

Tony
--
Tony Toews, Microsoft Access MVP
Tony's Main MS Access pages - http://www.granite.ab.ca/accsmstr.htm
Tony's Microsoft Access Blog - http://msmvps.com/blogs/access/
For a free, convenient utility to keep your users FEs and other files
updated see http://www.autofeupdater.com/
Granite Fleet Manager http://www.granitefleet.com/