Using Experts Exchange: An Analytical  Method

Wesley MillerInformation Technology Practitioner
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24 Years of Experience. CompTIA A+ ce and Security + ce Certified,   Microsoft MCP.
Unites States Air Force Veteran.
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The way I use Experts Exchange to assist me in analyzing and diagnosing a problem is I first enter a Verbose Question at Experts Exchange like: Office 2007 will hang when opening and saving files

I then launch WordPad (any text editor will do) and start a document like the one below:
Experts Exchange
Date
My Reference/comments

 
Verbose Question I typed in: MS Office hangs on opening a file
Results with brief info on it and possible solutions from its logs:
ID: 22513823, Here is MSDN's take on this STOP error:

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms795478.aspx

ID: 22973588, Very slow opening excel files in office 2007
You might take a look at the following articles:
An Office program is slow or may appear to stop responding (hang) when you open a file from a network location
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833041/en-us 

Next, I try the selected solutions I find and enter the results in my document. If I discover something the Experts Exchange Question didn’t addressee but applies to the problem, I add it to that question to inform others looking at a similar problem.

I save my created document in a folder with a meaningful name so I can access it again for any similar issues.

By following the above steps, you are creating a solution journal for problems and issues encountered as well as what is needed to fix the problem. This saves you time in the future as it jogs your memory as to what had to be done to resolve the problem and what resources were used previously to find that solution.

You can then do a search on the same question to determine if any of the previous noted ID's have additional info that might help to resolve the issue if the previous solution did not. And if you need to ask a new, more refined question, it gives you some material to help Experts focus on the issue you are actually having. This avoids Experts suggesting solutions you already have in your document that didn’t work for you.
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Wesley MillerInformation Technology Practitioner
CERTIFIED EXPERT
24 Years of Experience. CompTIA A+ ce and Security + ce Certified,   Microsoft MCP.
Unites States Air Force Veteran.

Comments (2)

Wesley MillerInformation Technology Practitioner
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Author

Commented:
MHenry ,
            Yes the edits look good.
Thanks Wes
Jason C. LevineDon't talk to me.
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Commented:
Hi wmiller,

Interesting method for using EE and I thank you for sharing it with us.

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