Below, Frank has done a great job asking the exact sort of question that new GIS users ask, and which we as an OSGeo community should address to attract new users.

What has been done so far toward building a FAQ on "How to you XXX with Open Source GIS?"?

Frank wrote:
Not only am I new to the forum, but
I'm new to GIS work in general.

I downloaded the Live CD and installed it on a virtual machine and it's
working great. I'm trying to build a suite of GIS tools I can for the various
tasks I have to do at work and it's great having so many products right
in front of me. It's highly quality work and I appreciate all the hard
work to pull it together.

What would be really helpful to me (and possibly other new-to-GIS folks
like myself) is a FAQ-type list of questions with app answers. For example:


Do you want to edit shapefiles? Try xxx, yyy, zzz.
Do you want to style shapefiles? Try ...
Do you want to work exclusively with raster files?
Do you need to work simultaneously with raster and vector files?
Do you want to convert one file into one another format?
Do you want to convert raster to vector?
Vector to raster?
Vector to another vector?

etc.

If there were a couple dozen questions with short answers it would really
supplement the disc quite well.

For instance, I'm trying to figure out how to convert a raster (binary
GRID) file into a shapefile. I dink around in the various programs on the
CD, but I don't know if I just can't find the "convert raster to vector"
option in a particular app or if it isn't there at all. A short little
Q&A text file would be nice to help at least focus my initial search
a little bit better. At the least I (hopefully) would be pointed to the
best choices for my purpose.


Hope this makes sense!

Frank

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