On Tue, 18 Sep 2007 10:34:54 +0100, "Paul Lautman"
<paul.lautman@btinternet.com> wrote:

>About 70% of the questions that I answer on this form I do so simply by
>reading the manual.
>
>Posters could save a lot of time by doing similar.

Not when you don't know where to look.

I have read a lot of parts of the manual, and still can ask silly
questions here from time to time, because I missed something. It takes
30 seconds to somebody who knows, while it can take me more than one
hour to go to the very deep footnotes completely missing the headline,
because I thing I already read it.

And worse in that case : OP did not know that the correct word to look
for was union, he thought it was concatenate ; browsing the manual
would have been for this a waste of time. Now he knows where to read,
that's very valuable information that the manual can not give him
without a thorough review of it, which would take hours.