Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual
(Covers Service Release 1)
By Nan Barber, Tonya Engst & David Reynolds
Published by Pogue Press
List Price $29.95
Reviewed By Gail H Schadt
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Office X for Macintosh: The Missing Manual(Covers Service Release 1) By Nan Barber, Tonya Engst & David Reynolds Published by Pogue Press Reviewed By Gail H Schadt |
I found this to be a great book. It provided answers to any problem I had moving from an Office version I bought in 1991. I did update Word to 5.1a and Excel to 3.0a so they would be compatible with Mac OS 7.5 in approximately 1994. It is recommended to any one using the OS X version of Office.
There are four parts for each of the Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage), one Part on Office as a whole (customizing Office - Toolbars, Menus, and key strokes), a Part on Office's built-in graphic programs, and a Part containing an appendix on installation and trouble shooting and an appendix on the office help system.
The Office I bought in 1991 came with about 4 inches of manuals in a box for your shelf. Office X came with none. One has to rely on the Help System that I found to be somewhat difficult to use. There have been nomenclature changes which made searching somewhat iffy and that alone makes the book worthwhile.
This book ha s 673 pages, 691 with the appendices. I started on page one and learned many things about Word I never knew and in some cases did not care about. That is not to mean that they were not interesting and may prove useful in the future. The authors' state that most people do not know of 80% of the Office features let alone use them all.
Explanations of Office functions are clear with steps to accomplish, and graphics with notes to assist. The graphics are reproductions of the software windows. As such, they show all the buttons and menus. There are also tips that provide additional help to using the functions. There are also five highlighted, printed with a grey background, categories of assistance. These are called Power Users' Clinic, Gem in the Rough, Workaround Workshop, Up To Speed, and Frequently Asked Questions.
The most significant changes the book helps with are the menu changes that place menu items in different menu bar pull down menus.
It should be noted that if you are using an Office version prior to Office 2001, that there are functions that require different steps than in Office X. In fact I got the feeling these changes were to a more Windows like process. This applies to Word and Excel. I cannot comment on PowerPoint and Entourage because I have never used these applications. According to the book, there are a limited number of Office changes since Office 2001.
A short time after receiving the book to review, a " window" appeared in my checking account Excel spreadsheet. I had not seen anything like this in Excel 3.0a. I could not get rid of it. Remembering I had the book, I started paging thru the Excel part and soon saw a reproduction of an Excel window that looked just like my computer screen. The book told me what I was seeing and how to eliminate it. This book is good.
After reading about 200 pages of the part on Word and the above experience, I decided this book should be scanned for general content picking up specific functions of immediate interest, reading portions on a causal basis, and keeping next to my computer for problem solving and exploration of new ways to help make your Office X experience easier and more rewarding.
It is noted that each part of the book follows the same format as the Word part and is just as easy to use. The only part I have not used is the Entourage part since I have no interest in Entourage.
There is so much content, that trying to read from page one to page 691 would cause one's head to burst.
I checked the O'Reilly web site and did not see individual books for any of the four applications covered in this book. Since the cost of the book is not excessive, buying it to help with one of the applications would be cost effective, especially for Word or Excel.