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Microsoft Office 2003 – The Complete Reference

Reviewed by Jean-Guy Marcil – Laval (Québec) 2004

 by Jennifer Ackerman Kettell, Guy Hart-Davis, Curt Simmons

Published by McGraw Hill / Osborne http://books.mcgraw-hill.com

ISBN:           0072229950     904 pp.

Published    2003-09-25       Price: $US39.99

With such a title, you know this book has set ambitious goals for itself. When I saw that it had over 900 pages, I thought that it might succeed in being indeed a complete reference to Office 2003.

But with Office 2003 Microsoft has widened the Office umbrella to include many more applications, such as InfoPath, OneNote, Visio, Publisher and FrontPage in addition to the traditional Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint and Access (which was usually included in the Office Professional package). Some of these applications (such as Visio) are available only as stand-alone products, but once they are installed on a computer that already has Office 2003 installed, they will graft themselves to the Microsoft Office branch of the “All Programs” list reached from the Start button on the desktop.

While the book does not claim to cover all those applications, it is still impossible that a 900-page book be a complete reference for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, FrontPage, Publisher, VBA and XML, all of which are covered in the book. So now that we know that it is not a Complete reference, what kind of reference is it?

At some level it is complete if we mean that the book covers all the basic functions each application offers, such as mail merge in Word, pivot tables in Excel, queries in Access, Web-forms in FrontPage and color management in Publisher just to name a few. It stops being complete if we mean each subject is described and explained in detail.

Only the most basic functions are covered, i.e., just enough to successfully use the function being described. For example, it will guide you through the step-by-step process of doing a mail merge with Word, but with only 6 pages on the subject (including screen captures), you can imagine that a lot is being left unsaid; for those unfamiliar with Word’s mail merge function, it should be noted that a full chapter would need to be written to fully cover this function. Thus, we can safely state that this book is a summary reference to the basic functions each application offers.

There are still some strong points to this book. The writing is concise and clear; the screen captures are not overly used and are useful to clarify points being made; the chapters are well organized: starting with topics common to all office applications (file management and text and drawing tools), followed by sections devoted to each application (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Access, FrontPage and Publisher) and finally by a section on the integration and collaboration of the various applications. Also, there are very useful tips and advanced notions that are offered as shortcuts and as ways to avoid potentially problematic situations.

On the weak side, this is definitely not a “how to” book. For example, in Word, while it describes section breaks (1 page), headers and footers (3 pages) and page numbering (1 page), it fails to bring together these tightly interconnected topics, which are often the source of many nightmares for inexperienced users who delete a section break and throw the whole document in disarray as a result. The answer to this kind of problem is not in this book.

The book is also too ambitious for its own good. For example, the chapters on VBA are written for absolute beginners, but because the chapters are so short, most beginners will quickly need another “real” VBA reference. Since there are numerous VBA resources on the Web or in Microsoft official documentation, I think it would have been better to just refer the reader to a more complete reference than trying to teach them what a variable is and how to create one.

Finally, it would have been useful to have the new features in Office 2003 highlighted in some way in the book. As it is, the more experienced reader has to scan page after page to find that kind of information. Because of that, I do not think this book will be all that useful to more advanced Office users, unless they are making the transition from Office 97 to 2003.

All in all, this book is a good buy for the beginners, or for an advanced user of a few Office applications who wants to find out about the other Office products — for example, an advanced Access programmer might want to know more about FrontPage and Publisher. As another example, the XML subject is briefly described in the application collaboration section and there is an appendix devoted to the topic. It is not enough to really become proficient in using XML, but it can be used as a starting point for someone who wants to know if XML is the answer to some specific situation at work. If you have more than one such query regarding the various Office products, than this book is for you as well.