Re: Org Tutorials need more structure

[M <Elwood151@web.de>]

Hi Carsten & all, 

thanks for this good idea and the resulting discussion here!

my 2 cents about the tutorials page:
yes, I agree, that especially for absolute beginners (new to Emacs and new
to org-mode) it would be helpful to have a very basic step by step tutorial.
The list of "General introductions" is very long and quite confusing.

How I came to using org-mode?

I am a newby (at least I still feel like one, although I'm working with
Emacs org-mode now for more than 1.5 years), so maybe my experience might
help here.

I was a GTD user at first using other "GUI oriented" GTD software like
Thinking Rock, iGTD. iGTD had some problems and was not updated any more, so
I started searching for a new tool  and found Charles Cave's GTD tutorials
[1] (nearly 3 years ago, it seems!) and then started using org-mode since
Jan 2012. 
I then found Bernt Hansen's excellent site and used his setup [2] for my
first steps with org-mode, but it was very hard to adapt the agendas and
settings to my needs (and I'm still struggling).
Furthermore, Sacha Chua's blog is very interesting and I'm often looking at
the worg tutorials page.

So my first interest was todo/task/project management, but I quickly became
interested in note-taking, exporting, attachments, dired, bookmarks,
linking, ...

My problems were (and still are):
a) I am one of those users, which have never been really working with Emacs
before, so at the beginning, it's very hard to understand the concept and
basic commands.
Many tutorials take for granted a lot of knowledge.

b) I'm using two different OS's (Windows 7 at work and OS X 10.6 at home),
each one has its own problems when setting up advanced features.
It is especially difficult, to set up an efficient workflow to integrate MS
Outlook (Mails/Calendar) and Emacs org-mode...

c) I'm only an engineer, not a professional programmer. My knowledge about
programming in general and elisp and Emacs configuration is still very
limited, unfortunately. see a)

[1] http://members.optusnet.com.au/~charles57/GTD/gtd_workflow.html
[2] http://doc.norang.ca/org-mode.html

Nevertheless thank you for this great tool and all the work you all put in
maintaining, extending, documenting and helping!
Org-mode changed my way of working and I never was so close to having a good
and efficient system as I am now with org-mode. (as soon as long as I don't
have to search for the solution of a problem :( )

Kind regards

Martin 


Carsten Dominik <carsten.dominik <at> gmail.com> writes:

> and came away with the feeling that that this page has become
> somewhat useless for people who are really new to Org.
> 
> Can we have a discussion here on how this path should look like?
> When you came to Org-mode as a newby, what were the three resources
> that really made an impression on by being accessible and
> providing feel and promise for digging deeper?