Are there too many Office forums?
November 27, 2009 @ 7:00 AM by JP • 1 views • No Comments »
I just joined PODA. In case you didn't know, PODA stands for Professional Office Developer Association. I love the idea of a developer-driven organization, but I'm concerned about a couple of things.
- Out of 398 members (as of this writing), only 84 have logged in at least once in the last year, and only 30 have logged in during the last six months.
- The requirements for joining seem pretty loose. (I'm reminded of the Groucho Marx quote: "I don't care to belong to a club that accepts people like me as members.")
I'm late to the party, but the group already seems in decline. It'll be an uphill battle, so I've offered to write some blog posts to make the site a bit more current.
There was a discussion on their message board (as well as other places) about the number of Office-related forums. The consensus is that the market is saturated. As an exercise, I compiled a quick list of the forums I found, along with a brief analysis of each.
Below is a list of some of the Office forums I could find. Most are focused on Excel, while some have just a small Office section inside a forum covering other topics. I didn't list blogs (you can start at Blogs I Read and go from there), but did include some of the more popular mailing lists.
Office-only forums
- VBA Express
- MrExcel
- Office Questions
- Chandoo's Excel forums
- OzGrid Forums
- Excel Forum
- The Office Experts
- Outlook Code
- Excel User Group
The forums are a bit quiet, but everything here is Office-related. There are even forums for Outlook, Project and Access. The site uses vBulletin software.
The forums are much busier, but you'll only find Excel-related questions here, with some automation stuff sprinkled in. Same software as VBA Express.
A relative newcomer to the forum scene, Office Questions uses the same Q&A engine as Stack Overflow. It isn't really a forum though, or maybe it's a forum with only one channel.
While technically it is a forum, it's more like a Wordpress add-on. There are sections for charting, general Excel questions, and support for Chandoo's products. (which, by the way, you can purchase here. Note: this is an affiliate link.)
I find this site hard to navigate, and ads are everywhere. The forum seems very strict as well. Also uses vBulletin. What's with that?
This site looks about as busy as VBA Express, or maybe a bit more, and also uses the same software as OzGrid, MrExcel and VBA Express.
This site seems very quiet, looks mostly abandoned.
The only site I only of dedicated to Outlook. The forums are lively, but seem understaffed.
Very quiet, I only see a few posts per week.
Forums with Office sections
These are forums dedicated to programming or IT, that contain sections for VBA or Office questions.
- Microsoft Discussion Groups
- MSDN Developer Network Forums
- Stack Overflow
The Microsoft newsgroups. Probably the most popular and valuable resource for learning Office. Need I say more?
A very small section on MSDN. The traffic is lively, but is dwarfed by the number of forums on other topics such as VSTO and SharePoint. Faint praise!
You can ask an Excel question here, but try and answer one and you risk being attacked and having anonymous site visitors downgrade your answer.
Honorable Mentions
- Excel-L/G mailing lists
- Yahoo Groups
- LinkedIn Groups
- CNET forums
- Wrox P2P Forums: Access VBA and Excel VBA
Old school text-based mailing lists have been outdone by forums like MrExcel and Usenet, as well as every other form of available help. The web interface is ancient, and don't you dare question the relevance of off-topic humor posts that crop up on Fridays.
Another mailing list gets mention here. I like Yahoo Groups because the web interface is more interactive, and it just feels more lively. If you already use Yahoo, even better, because the Groups section is integrated with the rest of their site.
You should already be using LinkedIn, but the Groups feature seems to be more of a ego thing, i.e. "Look at my profile and how many groups I'm in." The traffic in the Excel groups that I've seen is minimal at best, and of low quality.
Almost an afterthought, the Office section on CNET is filled with generic Excel questions that would do better on Usenet. Not really worth visiting.
These forums are provided by Wrox, the publisher of many Office tomes, but the forums are very quiet. Still, it's one of the (very) few publisher-sponsored forums I've seen.
Sites to avoid
There are a few help forums out there that annoy me. They are:
The Code Cage – http://www.thecodecage.com/forumz/
Egghead Cafe – http://www.eggheadcafe.com/
Access Monster – http://www.accessmonster.com/
These sites (and I'm sure there are others) are web portals to the Microsoft newsgroups. The problem is that it isn't obvious that they are simply pulling and regurgitating someone else's content, so if you visited one of them and didn't know better, you might think it's an original forum. The thing that really bothers me is that they have successfully fooled more than a few people into using their sites to respond to newsgroup postings. The site will then edit the poster's username and include the site's URL, or add a tagline to each post with an ad for the site.
Do we need more forums? Even Simon Murphy thought about starting one. I think the amount of demand does not exceed the current supply, and could even go with a few less forums.
Do you know of any other Office forums, or did I get something wrong in this post? How many forums do you participate in? Do you think any of them should shut down? Let me know in the comments section below.
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Very good compilation.. My favorite is Stackoverflow excel questions. I have subscribed to their RSS in my google reader and scan the list every now and then to find some interesting questions.
Also, another interesting way I find excel questions is thru twitter – search for "How to excel" and scan the results, you find some good questions and most of the time a quick tweet response would do.
Ofcourse, my own forums are good too.. I am getting a lot of useful questions and material for my blog thru that.
Thanks for the tips, I'll check them out.
You can add the Twitter query as a feed as well… http://search.twitter.com/search.atom?q=How%20to%20Excel
PODA has NEVER been in incline. It was doomed when it failed to set sensible objectives for the organisation right at the start. I doubt you could even find its originator there now.
OzGrid suffers from paranioa. Dave even banned his two admmins a few years back. He has a vision and seems to be happy with it, for me it is useless now.
The NGs are in sharp decline too, when I was active on them it was the prime qusetion site. Now, you frequemtly get less than a dozen questions per day on some groups.
Perhaps Excel is dying?
A lot of the original participants at PODA seem to be missing.
What newsgroups are you referring to? I don't read from all of them, as some of them are slow and/or taken over by spammers.
I am referring to the Microsoft UseNet newsgroups, public.excel, excel.misc, excel.charting, excel.programming, excel.worksheetfunctions.
I don't find them slow, I use a mail client not the MS web portal, and I also don't see to much spam, although it seems to come in waves and is far more than it was a few years ago.
Jimmy -
I think it was an ongoing discussion with me that spurred this post. There are too many available sources for information, and it is hard to determine which are reliable. The user's attention is fragmented. I suspect now the concept of a "forum" is dated, because people can just type a few keywords into Google and get very focused results.
Many forums suffer because it is hard to justify the effort in administration without a solid amount of traffic. Mr Excel has that traffic and its quality is pretty good. VBAX has the quality but I don't think the traffic. Ozgrid seems to have sufficient traffic, despite its ugly interface and less reliable information. The MS Newsgroups still have sufficient traffic, but its quality has suffered.
I've considered hosting my own forums, but I don't think it would be worthwhile to host more than product support topics.
If you started a forum on your site, I think it would end up just being you answering every question. If it isn't about a product you're selling (i.e. making money), it would just be like working for free.
I don't mind doing some pro bono work. My 200+ web pages and 300+ blog posts include many tutorials which are freely available. Much of the free customer service I provide to customers of my software products involves custom instructions showing how to add desired features to the charts created by my software.
I offer free help in some of the forums we've discussed here and elsewhere, but I choose the questions I decide to answer. If I had my own forum with general Excel Help topics, I'd be inundated, and would feel obliged to respond to everything. I could make it members-only, but members may feel entitled to a special level of help.
My approach now is then to provide the same assistance as I already do, but provide specific customer service forums for users of my software.
Are there too many office forums? Yes. Thanks for putting together that list!
Am I inferring correctly that you dislike Stack Overflow? Your description of the downvote system sounded a bit unfair to me: a downvote requires the voter to sacrifice some reputation, so there is a good incentive to do it only when there is a problem with the answer. In any case, Stack Overflow has quickly become my favorite source of info for programming related questions, for the speed and quality of the answers. Office/Excel questions are not the most active, though… Maybe "Office Questions" will fill that gap.
As an aside, I also prefer one searchable list of topics, to multiple sub-forums. Given the quality of search today, sub-forums only get in my way when looking for something and make for confusing navigation, in my opinion!
Yes, I dislike Stack Overflow. I'm not going to debate the technical aspects of the site, but I find the focus on badges and points distracting. The difference between it, and other forums where you aren't "rated" so critically (with corresponding effect on your ability to use the site), disturbed me.
I like Stack Overflow, though the Excel/VBA content is scant, and in general I don't like rating systems on forums.
I hear you on the distraction of the badges system. On the rating part, I am on the fence. Most other forums give some "experience"/creds based on how long you have lurked on the forum and posted, which is really totally independent of how good your answer is. The vote system of StackOverflow is much better, in that it provides relevant information on how much credence to put in answers…
Jon is totally right, though, the office/VBA activity is fairly limited.
I judge an answer based on whether it leads me to a solution, not the source of the answer. There is no way a rating system will replace my judgment.
Stack Overflow can be a bit hostile to Excel questions since superuser.com was started, this is a better environment for Excel/basic VBA questions and the community includes many of those who use Stack Overflow, so the knowledge level can be very high.
What is the difference between superuser.com and Stack Overflow? They look the same.
SuperUser is geared towards power user, i.e. computer savvy people who are not necessarily developers, for "power-usage" of applications, whereas StackOverflow is aimed at professional developers, with programming questions.
Hi JP, thanks for the list, and the reviews (and the link)
'*Even* sm thought about starting one…'
PODA was doomed from early on when they declined to focus on a manageable niche IMO. If it had been Excel only or outlook only or even word only, it would have been smaller but more targeted, and relevant to its members.
I didn't really notice any high points in your list, and am inclined to agree with Bob that certain aspects of Office development are dying (finally, having been starved of any IDE enhancements for 12 years!)
Perhaps it will be reborn as VSTO/VSTA ?
I'm surprised you don't find ANY useful forums! Then again, you think Excel-L is the best way to get Excel help.
I don't see VSTO as being the VBA killer because of the learning curve, and the existing ease of use with VBA.