Getting help with Adobe products

Categories: Howtos

“Help! I need somebody! Help! Not just anybody! Help!” – – John Lennon

Where do you go to get help? It depends, of course, on what kind of help you need. As John told us, “just anybody” won’t do – we need someone who can help with our particular problem. That’s an issue if the kind of computer help you need is help with OSU’s newly-available Adobe products. Our computer specialists in DASNR IT are great at fixing your PC, at helping you get set up, or at recommending solutions for particular areas of tech usage. We’re not so great at helping people know how to use InDesign or Illustrator, though, because we haven’t had the chance to use them much ourselves. If you need help getting them installed, we can do it, but if you need help laying out your newsletter, you’re likely to get the awkward silence on our end of the line …

Fortunately, there’s a lot of really good expert advice available for you. YouTube has been a good source for a while now, with a number of talented creators posting tutorials on their channels; the only caveat is that you need to make sure that the video is built around the same version of the Adobe products that you have, because some of them are several versions out of date. Menus or tool names may have changed and even the basic methods of doing things may be different between versions. One I’ve used (and would recommend) is Photoshop Tutorials (https://www.youtube.com/user/NewWorldOps). If you want to do some creative things with Photoshop, you’ll find some good how-to instructions there.

Perhaps even better, especially for products that may be new to you, is Adobe’s own help site (https://helpx.adobe.com/support.html) where you can find tutorials for all of the Creative Cloud products. As I’m trying to learn more about the new tools we have, I find myself here more and more; it’s very easy to find what I need to know, and very easy to progress at a speed that’s comfortable for me. Give it a try – you won’t be sorry.