Customer Reviews

2007 Microsoft® Office System Step by Step

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This is a wonderful book for someone with little experience with any version of Microsoft Office. It is very basic. However, if you are already very comfortable with, say, Office 2003, you may want to consider buying a more advanced book.

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.

This book had the worst index I've ever seen in a reference book. It was too difficult to find solutions in the book. Certainly this is not a book for anyone with any Microsoft Office experience.

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.

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.

Complete shortcuts and gives real understanding to using the new version of office. An excellent book to have next to your computer

I have been using Office for a long time. I find that when I need to update my skills on a new version of Office the Step-by-Step series meets my requirments in that I can go through the exercise as needed or go through the quick review section depending on how much the product has changed

This item has served its purpose. I provides insight about the newly release Office Suite explaining the newest features and how to effectively use them. Great book!

This step by step book is very informative and detailed. I bought the book assuming I would receive all materials ( as this was not speculated in the initial purchase). Upon receiving the book, it was missing the demo cd to complete the tutorial projects. Not impressed.

This is the only exception of which I'm aware to the high standards of the Step by Step series. I struggled with it until I realized that it wasn't just me. There are typos and pedagogical errors such that I concluded it was probably rushed into production before sufficient resources were put into this tutorial software.