Sunday starts

While the official conference doesn't really begin until Monday, the Sunday afternoon "supplemental" sessions are underway. I spent a little time already in a well-attended session on writing better help procedures, and am now in a session on Adobe Acrobat, which is really interesting.

Some of the stuff I caught in the help procedures session was about categories of mistakes that documentation falls into.  They include procedures that miss information and procedures that bury information or don't have good entry points (indexes!) to useful information.

The Acrobat astuff is interesting. I came in as the presenter was demonstrating how to add and format buttons in Acrobat documents, showing off buttons that not only take users to different places, but that run multimedia, such as sound and video.

There are hands-on sessions too, which is far more useful than simply trying to absorb a bunch of slideware in a 60-minute main conference session. It's kind of too bad that more people don't take advantage of this useful learning opportunity.