RTM and RTFM

Must have been living under a rock as I had absolutely no clue on the meaning of these acronyms when I came across them recently on one of the BIM related group forums.

Was not going to be the one to publicly ask the question and not intrigued enough to search for it on the net, thankfully it was all revealed.

RTM = Read The Manual; RTFM = I’ll let you work that out yourself... (I’ve copied the explanation from the source here, even I got the message quickly...)

I learned two software packages from manuals.

Three if you count Coreldraw, though only got half through that book.

All of this happened almost 20 years ago!

The time of manuals has gone. Or at least in the sense of ‘this is the interface, these are the commands, the buttons...’

By now the way we interact with the machine should be common practice. By and large it is.

Only when software developers ignore this, we find ourselves facing packages that we need to start learning from scratch.

The ‘proud-parents’ of those products may have thought to have invented the best possible way to rotate a building through the mouse or the most ergonomic way to spread the commands over the ribbon, but if I need to spend hours to memorise these tools and moves...they’ve lost me.

(Crocodile Dundee figures out how to use the bidet)