Mining for Concise Tech Tutorials on wikiHow

In a recent post “5 Free Online Answer Sites for Tech Questions,” I discussed sites that can provide you with quick, good responses to tech questions at no cost. These can be valuable for people who don’t work out of a central office or have access to an IT department. I’ve been exploring the tutorials found at wikiHow, and they, in a similar vein, are excellent free resources for mastering tasks in software applications, and much more.

The wikiHow site works like Wikipedia, so that anyone can edit tutorial entries, and there is a Writer’s Guide and Practice Page for learning how to edit entries. The site doesn’t cater only to tech tutorials, but runs deep with many articles on using applications that we all live with, every day.

There are, for example, many step-by-step tutorials on customizing and getting more out of Firefox. In quite a few cases, the tutorials are illustrated, as seen in this one on organizing Bookmarks in the browser. This tutorial presents advanced ways to make Firefox pages load faster.

There are also a lot of useful tutorials on Google tools and applications at wikiHow. This tutorial provides a short course in performing advanced searches in Google, and this one explains how to get your site indexed by Google.

There aren’t as many tutorials on wikiHow for lesser-used applications. I found very few for Google Chrome, for example, but the site does turn out surprises for some smaller applications. For example, I found several tutorials for one of my favorite freeware image editors: IrfanView.

It’s worth looking through wikiHow for instructions relevant to your work. In most cases, the tutorials are tight, concise and easy to follow.

Where do you go for tech tutorials?

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