Amazon.com Review
Continuing the grand tradition of O'Reilly's Windows Annoyances series, Office 97 works from the premise that using Office 97 and its component applications can be a downright awful experience without an understanding of various customization and optimization features. You'll find plenty of top-level tricks for customizing and making good use of each application's toolbars and settings and the Office Shortcut Bar. A large section of the book is devoted to Visual Basic for Applications, the programming language that allows you to customize the applications themselves. Some Office 97 quirks that are considered beyond help are also discussed, such as a variety of "sticky settings"--settings in Office applications that automatically change in all of the component apps, even if you don't want them to. In addition to global Office issues, the guide addresses each of the component applications--Word, Excel, Access, PowerPoint, and Outlook. Office 97 Annoyances also explores the latest Web-enabled features of the suite, how to use the component apps to develop for the Web, and where to go online to find more information and tools to ease your frustrations. Office 97 Annoyances is not for novices and assumes a certain level of expertise. Users with the right experience level and the desire to take more control of their computing lives will benefit immeasurably from this informative and entertaining addition to a clever series.
Product Description
Despite marked improvements from version to version, much in Office 97 remains annoying. Two dozen shortcuts are scattered on the Start menu in no apparent order; the Shortcut Bar is filled with an overwhelming number of applications; and many hidden gems are tucked away in various places on the Office 97 CD. Office 97 Annoyances illustrates step-by-step how to get control over the chaotic settings of Office 97 and shows how to turn the vast array of applications into a simplified list of customized tools ready to execute task the task at hand. This book shows you how to:
- Configure the Office Shortcut Bar to provide an effective tool for accessing Office applications and documents
- Customize the toolbar of each Office application except Outlook
- Use Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) as a macro language to control the behavior of the individual Office components
- Control pan-Office "sticky" settings
- Manage shortcomings in the Office Binder, an integration utility developed to address shortcomings in Office integration
