FF> Surely there must be an 'elsewhere' wherein these answers can in fact be found, not by guesswork or trial-and-error or endless and often fruitless hours of trawling Google, or even by employing workarounds, but by asking people who actually know the answers?


Firefox, I do agree with your concerns. For thirty-five years I have been posing questions and receiving answers through BBS networks, DOS-based and now Windows-based. Many of my questions have gone unanswered. That's Life.
I too am frustrated by failures in search engines; I put most failures down to my weird dialectic vocabularies (in the main Lancashire UK, Yilgarn Western Australia, and now Toronto and Newfoundland in Canada. That, too, is life.


The hours spent trawling Google (or whatever) are not, however, fruitless, as I think you will see. Take your favourite unanswered question, just one, and go looking for an answer, not just here, but wherever you think an answer might be found. When, if, you do find an answer elsewhere, add that BBS to your list of goto-places for answers.




Examples from my life abound: I am implementing Word2003/VBA applications that mine data from web pages. "Selenium" was recommended. My usual VBA haunts do not favour Selenium, but I found a site with excellent videos that got me started the first time out. A Miracle!
And herein lies a tale: If right now you search for "Selenium VBA" you will get hits. But if you search "YouTube selenium excel" you will immediately find the video of the UK firm who produce these (to me) excellent videos.

My failure in effecting searches lies mainly in my use of my mother tongue ("dialects" above). My early days in programming used "macro" to mean a compile-time action that expanded into source code to be compiled into an 80-column punched card object deck. Microsoft have popularized the use of Macro to mean "run-time procedure with no parameters", that is "a subroutine with no parameters".


Today? I have located a half-dozen BBS in which I search for answers in specific areas, and am usually satisfied with responses. There is a possibility that some unanswered posts are from people who expect one tool - Microsoft Office Forums - to solve every problem. I do not expect that of my carpentry tools, nor my gardening tools. Why should I expect any different from my online tools?


Perhaps you might identify a specific post in (I think) the Outlook Forum, and one or more of us might see what we can find. After all, if there really is no answer, then there really is no answer; but if several answers can be found elsewhere, then perhaps the original poster just didn't try hard enough?
Cheers, Chris