The 2007 Microsoft Office System Step by Step

List Price: $39.99 Discount Price: $18.39

Customer Reviews:

Instead of Step-by-Step, title the book "What's New" [Posted on 2008-02-29]
This book mostly emphasizes what's new in Office 2007. It is not, however, a book for someone who wants to learn the concept of Word/word processing, Excel/spreadsheets, Access/databases, PowerPoint/presentations, etc., etc. I teach Microsoft applications and I'm frustrated using this book because the exercises are "lame" and go from simple to advanced stuff in the same practice. Especially bad are the Excel exercises because they have been poorly proofread; they have mistakes and mix beginners with advanced stuff in each chapter and in each exercise, it's hard to assign any of them as homework. Also, it totally skips Page Setup and the very useful AutoSum button, not to mention a lot of other basic stuff a beginner needs to know. It's as bad a book as the previous Office 2003 Step-by-Step series. I am not happy with it at all and would not recommend it for beginners. It might help someone who is gearing up for the MS Office 2007 certification, but don't bank on this book alone for study material.

MS Office 2007 [Posted on 2008-03-10]
I consider this book to be one of the most informative and easy to use manuals I have ever encountered. I am over 80 years of age so have tried a few! It is clearly set out, easy to follow instructions, and useful tutorials in the accompanying disk. Together with several other Step By Step manuals, I would never consider purchasing anything else.

Windows Step by Step guide [Posted on 2008-04-23]
I bought this book, for my brother so he could use his computer easier. It seems to be helping him. I would recommend this to anyone that needs to understand Window's and their computer better.

VISTA BOOKS REVIEW [Posted on 2008-06-14]
Since VISTA is new, it sometimes hard for a IT professional to use it, particularly the new feature. (I spent 22 years in IT.) This new book is excellent, fairly easy to use.

Keep looking - this simply cannot be the best option out there! [Posted on 2008-07-13]
I have been an MS Office user for more than a decade. I have been using Office XP or 2003 on my systems but needed to add a new PC to my office and it came with 2007. While I do not need instruction on the basics of using Office, there are some new things about this version that are unique and it would be nice to know what the critical changes are, other than the graphics design and where they hid the buttons! And the 'manual' that comes with the MS software is, politely, a joke.

So I bought this book because my business runs a number of things on Excel that are critical and I upgraded the other PC to 2007 for consistency. Primarily I needed to understand what be gained or lost from critical files in converting them to the new Excel format.

For example, if you are working on an existing Excel file in 'compatibility mode' and hit 'save', you may well be presented with a dialog box that says that some formatting may be lost if you do not save in the Excel 2007 mode. It will nicely even tell you how many instances of formatting loss you will have and how 'important' those losses may or may not be. What it will NOT tell you is what the formatting losses are!

How about the 'Save As' command? You have the option of Saving as Excel Workbook, Excel Macro-enabled Workbook, Excel Binary Workbook and Excel 99-2003 workbook. Each option has a brief description but is not at all clear on when and why one format should be used over the other. Even using the Help files is of no Help.

Enter this book. Certainly a book sanctioned by MS would give me some good clues about what I gain or lose by using the compatibility format or certainly the binary format. Nope. The book offers NOTHING on what would seem to be a fairly basic bit of information - why use any given format and what is gained or lost when using one vs. another.

Thankfully I know how to use most of the functions that I need anyway, even if I now have to hunt for them since the menu format has so radically changed. But what I wanted from this book it has failed to deliver in every instance. Other than helping to understand the way the new ribbon bar works and a few other fairly minor issues, this book makes a wonderful paperweight. Maybe if you are a first time user of Office this book can be useful. But if you are converting from an earlier version and have some critical documents that you will be using in an ongoing manner, look elsewhere - this book will be of no help.

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