C8: Advanced Features

When you start expanding your adaptability skills, you may find yourself moving into the more advanced features of a program. When it comes to common programs, most people use them very shallowly—they only use a small portion of what the program can really do. Finding solutions can be a bit more challenging when you become a power user and start pushing the program to its fullest.

You may not be able to find help online for advanced features. In these instances, you get to practice figuring things out independently, using the troubleshooting skills you learned earlier. Remember to treat the process like an experiment:

1. Save a copy of your document before you try the experimentation process to avoid losing all your work if you make a major mess. It also helps if you keep track of what you have tried.

2. Try one thing and see if it works.

3. If it does not, undo that and try another.

4. If you have tried everything you can think of, try two things in tandem.

5. And so on…

Solving problems with advanced features often involves more kludging, more just making it work somehow. These solutions are often inelegant, but at times necessary.

Advanced features are more likely to contain bugs or not work as advertised. For example, Microsoft Word had a feature called master documents, originally implemented in the 1990s. You could stitch multiple documents together using a single master. There was only one problem: the master document would randomly corrupt the subdocuments to the point that they were unusable. When this first came out, we did not quite have easy access to the Internet, though you could find information if you knew where to look. Because we have better communication today, companies are less likely to release a program with such a messy bug. It does happen, though. So, if you are going to implement an advanced feature that you have never used before, you may want to do a quick web search to see if there are any key issues.

Advanced features are also more likely to tax your computer system, causing the program to slow or even crash. If you are using multiple advanced features at once, this increases the chance of such issues. You should always save often but do so even more when using advanced features. Additionally, make backups regularly. This way if a crash causes an issue with your document, you will not have to step so far back in your project.

We have amazing programs out there that do amazing things. However, we must know how to reign in that power. Once again, the way we do that is through practice.