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MBA's Guide to Microsoft Office XP: The Essential Office Reference for Business Professionals

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"Mba's Guide to Microsoft Office XP"

"the Essential Office Reference for Business Professionals"

by Pat Coleman, Stephen L. Nelson and David B. Maguiness

This book aims towards providing the business professional and business student with basic and intermediate "how-to" tutorials to effectively and efficiently use the 2002 version of the Microsoft Office Suite (including FrontPage). This book is widely available (on Amazon) in good but used condition for a pretty nominal price. (say $5 or so).

Lets us be clear, this book is not designed to show how to use every feature in MS Office. Instead the goal of the book is to teach you how to do a number of typical business activities like creating a business plan, giving a sales presentation (with and w/o PowerPoint), creating a newsletter, creating and managing a contacts database (in Outlook), doing a Profit-Volume-Cost analysis, analyzing a Capitol investment and creating a basic business website (with and w/o an basic e-commerce function).

This book assumes you know some accounting, finance and salesmanship. It also assumes you are computer literate and internet literate. It doesn't walk you though installing the operating system, using the operating system or installing Microsoft Office. It doesn't offer advice on upgrading your computer. Or tuning up your computer or anything like that. It is focused on using your computer to support business activities. If you need any of the above computer help, I do that kind of consulting.

The book has 3 sections and an appendix plus an index. The first section is "Quick Primers" for all the applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, Outlook and FrontPage), how to manage documents and implementing the speech recognition feature (for dictation of letters if nothing else). The middle section is titled "Using Office in Business." This section offers more advanced tutorials on Formatting in Word, Macros, Chart Objects, Office applets and using Mail Merge (a tricky thing to do, sometimes). The third section is titled "Office Business Projects." This part of the book walks you through various kinds of projects that are performed as part of an ongoing business. Like creating and delivering a sales presentation. Doing various kinds of financial analysis and creating a business plan.

To help you with 3 of the business projects mentioned above the authors have made available 3 spreadsheets. Bizplan.xls, Proftvol.xls, and Cashflow.xls The Proftvol.xls spreadsheet includes "breakeven" analysis. The book points towards the "Redmond Technologies Press" website to allow you to download these spreadsheets. That website is gone and re-directs you to the Mr. Nelsons stephenlnelson website. You will actually find all three spreadsheets there but you have to dig for them and the proftvol.xls spreadsheet has been re-named to something with three letters (pvc.xls). Since Mr. Nelson specifically has made these files available both for free and for re-use I have copied them to my website ChatNFiles. The review rules don't permit a URL.

Although this book has not been written to be "light" the way the "...for Dummies(tm)" series has, it does have some humor and is written in a straight forward manner to allow you extract the information you need pretty quickly and easily. Given the extreme discounts that (a used version of) this book now sells at, it is certainly worth adding to your bookshelf. If you want an unblemished copy the new ones look great. It replaces the equivalent Dummies book with a more business focused look of the MS Office 2002/XP suite. It should be read with a high-liter(tm) in hand to help you make the steps your learning stand out in the text. Enjoy!