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[crazyjake56]

I've been playing this game for a couple years and I've never been that great of a player as is evidenced by my question. What do you guys use the manager for? What is he or she useful for?

[Garath]

If I want 30 mechanisms I do it through the manager. Otherwise I'd have to have 3 mechanic workshops, set the items there and keep an eye on job cancelations or I might get 28. The same with things like soap, charcoal etc. I don't want to set the job every time the material runs out and it gets canceled. I let the manager add the job again untill they did 60 bars of soap, to coincide with 60 items of lye. I just set them at the same time and occasionally a lye gets canceled, or a soap, but it gets added again. Similarly, 20 rock doors, 20 beds, 20 rock coffers and 20 rock cabinets are much easier to set through the manager than manually through the workshops

[cdombroski]

I use the manager for pretty much anything I don't want an indeterminate amount of and that I don't care about the quality.
Need 2 ropes to station guard dogs at my entrance? j-m-q-rope-<enter>-2-<enter> is easier than finding the clothier and navigating that menu.
Need 24 furniture sets for the bedrooms I just designated to be dug? Manager can handle that. Plus, it spreads the jobs over all the available workshops.

[knutor]

My manager always contains these three, and sometimes duplicates of each.

Melt Item x30
Brew Drink x30
Prepare Lavish Meal x30

My manager never contains, Collect Sand.  I use the /R job fill for that, since usually I have a nonmagma workstation for collection and a magma workstation for crafting glassware.  And I put a few /S pauses in for enough delay, for an empty bag and a harvestable sand block to reappear.

When they start coughing I add Make Lye x30, Make Ash x30, and Make Soap x30, with soap being the furthest at the bottom, to avoid supply problems. 

[Matoro]

Also, in a bigger fort there will be many workshops of same type, and it'll become hard to (or time consuming) to use every workshop manually, especially if you have to do items in a large quantities. Whn I have multiple metalsmith's forges (= nearly always), it's just much easier to order the manager to set the job orders instead of checking every workshop.
Another example, when building building a set of 60 bedrooms, it's ideal to order masons and carpenters to build exactly 60 beds, doors, coffers and cabinets. Mandates are also very easy to do through manager.

[Larix]

I do most of my crafting jobs in bursts - collect and set up the base materials, then put the jobs on repeat until the ressources run out. I also often want specific dwarfs to do a particular job - e.g. copper weapons forged by the smith-in-training, not the legendary +12 one who's needed for making steel gear and bronze/iron trap components. Keeping the forges separated by 'P'rofile (which requires the manager) and assigning jobs according to the dwarf you're employing there works best for me for such purposes.

I mainly use work orders for clothes - just order thirty of everything through the manager and let the workshops sort it out by themselves. Other than that, the manager's mainly there to enable workshop profiles, although i agree classical bulk order jobs like 'components for 60 screw pumps' 'enough furniture for 48 bedrooms' 'full metal equipment for 18 soldiers' can be convenient to do through the manager as well.

[Irist GuruNoob]

The first several months I played the game I never touched the manager....would have made life so much easier.  I pretty much do all my production orders through it now.  I have the crappiest workshop layout ever for navigation for me (simple for the dwarfs) over various z-levels.  Instead of jumping all over to find workshops, hope their is room for the production order, find it in the list, blah blah....just him j, m and start typing, selected it from the list or hit enter, enter a number, enter again and just pay attention to canceled orders later.  No more sitting at a work station queuing up 9 jobs and waiting, queue up some more, wait...big time saver.

[Mushroo]

manager + macros = win

For example I have a "1 suit of steel armor and the coke to forge it" macro. And a "craft 30 rock pots and fill them with booze" macro. And a "process 30 pig tails, weave 30 threads to cloth, dye 30 cloth, craft 30 cloth bag, dye 30 thread, craft 30 cloth images, mill 30 dimple cups to bags of dye" macro.

you get the idea...