By definition, what people create using a computer is a unique expression of who they are. Whether it's a memo, a letter, a financial model, a presentation, an e-mail message, or a Web page, the fruit of a person's labors is something that only they could have produced.
On the other hand, how a person uses their computer — or, more to the point, how a person uses Microsoft Office — probably isn't unique at all. Most users follow the same menu paths to create, open, and save files, use the standard techniques for entering and formatting data, and perform customizations that don't go much beyond changing the default font.
That's because most users find it easier to simply tow the Microsoft party line and follow the techniques outlined in the Help system and in the vast majority of Office books. To be sure, this approach is reasonable for novice users who are intimidated by Office and so prefer to tread carefully to avoid upsetting any digital apple carts.
However, what about those users who qualify as "post-novice"? By that I mean any person who either knows the basics of Office or who has some computing experience and is smart enough to figure things out without having his or her hand held. For those users, doing things the "official" way is slower, less efficient, and less powerful because Office was designed from the ground up so as not to confuse novice users (or, I guess, not to confuse them more than necessary). The result is default settings that restrict your flexibility, interminable wizards that turn two-step tasks into twelve-step sagas, and the hiding of powerful and useful features behind layers of menus and dialog boxes. To get the most out of Office, the post-novice user needs an "unofficial" approach that goes where the Help system and other Office books fear to tread.
Welcome, therefore, to The Unofficial Guide to Microsoft Office 2007. In this book, I thumb my nose at the standard-issue techniques sanctioned by Microsoft and parroted in other Office books. Instead, I offer shortcuts for boosting your productivity, customizations for making Office work the way you do, workarounds for known Office problems, and warnings for avoiding Office pitfalls. Along the way, you'll learn about all kinds of insider details, undocumented features, powerful tools, and background facts that help put everything into perspective. So is this book merely a collection of tips, tricks, and traps? Not at all. This is a guide to Office. That means I teach you how to use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access, how to make these programs work together, how to collaborate with others, how to customize Office to suit the way you work, and much more.
Please use the links below to learn more about the book. (For some of the links you'll need a program that can open PDF files, such as Adobe Reader.)
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Table of Contents |
| Want to know what's in the book? Check out the Table of Contents (121KB), which gives you the complete contents of each chapter. There's also an HTML version. |
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Sample Chapter |
| Want to take a bit of the book for a spin? Read the full text of Chapter 1 (793KB), which shows you some tricks for working with Office documents. |
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Index |
| Want to know whether the book covers a specific topic that's near and dear to your heart? No problem. Check out the detailed Index (149KB), which lists every last topic that I cover in the book. |
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Forum |
| Want to ask a question about the book or let the world know what you thought of it? Have your say in The Dialogue Box. | |