Book details of 'Office 97 Annoyances'

Title	Office 97 Annoyances
Author(s)	Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, Timothy-James Lee
ISBN	1565923103
Language	English
Published	November 1997
Publisher	O'Reilly & Associates

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
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.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
At first glance, and read through, something appears to be amiss. Office consists of four, or more, applications. Two of those programs have already been covered in this series, in books not much smaller than this one. If all the Office components are to be covered in the same detail, why isn't the book that much larger? You have to examine the work carefully, and even then the answer isn't glaringly obvious. The prior books deal with individual applications, this text deals with Office as a system. That doesn't necessarily mean that you don't find tips about specific annoying functions in the applications in this book: you do. The choice of annoyances, though, seems to be informed by those features that are common across Office applications, or that are particularly important to work done with Office as a whole, rather than everything that can be done with the isolated tools. Chapter one is used to set the stage, and to note additional criteria for the selection of annoyances. Chapter two looks at Office as an entity itself, as well as noting some helpful suggestions for Office in its larger locale of Windows 95 and NT. Given that the book deals not simply with the use of Office 97, but specifically with annoying "features" of the system, it is difficult to see how even "Mr. Macro" can justify the, not one but *two*, chapters on macros and VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), particularly when they occupy almost a third of the entire book. Yes, macros are useful, yes, they may even help with some features of Office that are more repetitive than they need to be, and, yes, we know, going back as far as "The Hacker's Guide to Word for Windows" that Leonhard loves the programming power of Microsoft's application "languages," but the initial rationale for the chapters seems a bit thin. Two further chapters relate to advanced tasks and topics. One thing that shook me in chapter six was the mention of macro viruses. Yes, the authors do note that the macro warning dialogue box is *not* an annoyance and should be left on, and yes, the authors do state that Microsoft's rather lame attempt is *not* adequate protection and should be backed up with a real antiviral program. However, the statement that older (WordBasic) macros do not run under VBA is technically true but extremely misleading. In fact, one of the features of Office 97 is an autoconversion process for older macros which, in many cases, does a perfectly functional translation of older macros and, at first saving, stores them in the new VBA format. Chapter seven seems to deal mostly with Web related issues, plus one mention of Outlook as a contact manager. A very brief list of (still useful) resources concludes in chapter eight. As noted, the book can hardly be exhaustive. You probably will find your pet peeve listed, but, then again, you might not. As an introduction to solving the annoyances of Office this text leaves much to be desired. However, as an adjunct and follow-on to the earlier books it has its merits. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1998
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