44 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Develop Control Over Word's Automatic Formats!, February 1, 2001
This review is from: Just the tips, man for Microsoft Word 2000 (Spiral-bound)
This book deserves more than five stars for all the time and frustration it will save you.
If you are like me, Microsoft Word has two major drawbacks:
(1) Automatic formats that change things from what you want to what you don't want, and are hard to disable
(2) A manual that would cause a hernia to lift (and is daunting to contemplate opening).
This book overcomes both of those problems.
Let me explain a little about why this book is valuable before describing it.
First, the authors clearly have a lot of experience with Word because they had tips for every problem I have ever had using the program. Soon, I found myself racing through to find the sections that would help me.
Second, this book will be especially valuable to authors and others who need to create long text files. I knew there had to be ways to automatically do a universal change of one word for another. Now I know how to do it! Wow! Can you imagine how much time that will save?
Third, I suspect this book will be even more valuable to those who would like to add a lot of snazzy graphics to their Word documents. I don't plan to, but I was impressed to see how to do that.
The book is spiral bound and comes with a cardboard stand, so I can leave it on the top of my word processing station and flip through it easily without having to clear a lot of space.
The structure is logical in that it begins with simple subjects and moves on to more specialized ones. Here are the topics:
Documents, documents, documents
Navigating a document
Selecting and navigating text
Character and paragraph formatting
Changing fonts and point sizes
Special characters
Paragraph stuff
Lists?
Creating, editing and applying styles
Undo, cut, copy and paste
Lost something?
Page breaks, section breaks and columns
AutoCorrect, AutoText and the Spike
Creating and using forms and mail merge
Spell check and the Thesaurus
Out in the field
Those nasty tabs
Tables, rows and columns
Making templates
Headers, footers and cool page stuff
Squares, circles, stars, lines, autoshapes and more!
Selecting, moving and duplicating objects
Fills, lines, colors and shadows
Inserting objects and clip art
Hyperlinks
Toolbars
Menus
Help
Each tip page has more than one tip on it. The main one is presented in straightforward fashion. "#88 To paste the contents of the clipboard Press Ctrl + V." Then there is a comical cartoon figure (a surfer in this case) with another tip. These secondary tips vary in difficulty, with the type of character used indicating the complexity level. "The very happening thing is that I noted the last 4 shortcuts (Ctrl + Z, X, C and V) are in a row on the keyboard."
This page format works very well for breaking up the text, and making it more interesting. The shift in style allows the mind a break from one complicated item to another. It also creates a dialogue on the page that makes it easier to remember the idea.
It turns out that these ideas work on almost all versions of Word, so even if you do not have Word 2000, you will get benefit from this book. I use Word 6.0, and almost everything applies. A number of the directions apply to Excel and Powerpoint, as well.
What I had not realized is that Word is not well enabled for those who only use the mouse. The more sophisticated adjustments almost always require using the keyboard, instead. So that insight was worth the price of the book alone. I had found myself using the keyboard more and more with Word, and did not know why. Now I understand. It's because I can get my results faster and easier that way.
Let me give you one word of caution. Because the book starts with the simplest and works towards the most complex applications, you may already know most of the first 50 tips. Keep going. At some point, almost everything will be something that you did not know before.
I wish I could give you an idea of how to go right to the place where you will find exactly the right material to solve your own issues. I don't know how to do that. I suggest that you flip pages so that you can scanned everything once. Then you can come back when you want to use an item. You might add colored Post-It notes to mark the places with a note jotted on them about how you want to use the advice.
The only drawback I found in the book is that sometimes I did not understand the terms used, so the advice did not mean anything to me. A glossary of terms would have helped. Perhaps the "Help" feature in Word can get me through those.
I think there is also a potential benefit in seeing other ways to use Word. I did not realize that the 2000 version has list and mail merging features. That may be something we can use in our office.
After you have finished finding great nuggets of knowledge here, I suggest that you take something that you do for others. Ask them what difficulties they have in using what you provide. See if you can boil down what they need into easier-to-use formats, as well.
Go straight to the solution!
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15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A real gift., December 29, 2000
This review is from: Just the tips, man for Microsoft Word 2000 (Spiral-bound)
No matter what your level of experience in any subject you can sometimes run into problems and need some sort of help. Nerdy Books has put together a special way of making getting help easier and hassle free.
With over 500 tips in this small desk reference product, you'll be able to have the answers right at your fingertips. Looking just like a small desk calendar, this portable unit has a stand to hold up the book or you can fold it up and store it in your desk or briefcase.
Laced with excellent illustrations and tips that range from easy to cool to hard there is something in the manual for every level of expertise. One thing that maybe a drawback to this product is the fact that some of the pages stick together and flipping the page could cause ripping and tearing.
Covering topics like documents, paragraphs, cut, copy and paste, auto correct, toolbars, table, spell check are but a few of the areas you'll find tips and trick to. Overall this is a very good product any word user. Check out nerdybooks.com for other tips books, you won't be disappointed.
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