<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: A great reference book
Review: I borrowed this book when I saw it on a friend's desk and just didn't want to give it back (I kept it almost a week). I had to get a copy for myself. I learned so much about Word and I've been using it a long time. The whole middle part of the book is organized like Word's menus so whenever I have a problem or question, I can just open the book and jump right to an answer. I don't have to guess where it'll be or wade through an index. The books not very big, but it's just packed with so much information.
Rating:
Summary: Just what an O'Reilly book should be
Review: I didn't get this book from Amazon, but I had to write a review anyway. First of all, this is a typical O'Reilly book (unlike what the other reviewers say). If you want a tutorial book, try one of the other three hundred Word books that people put out. They are all simple hand-holding tutorial books. This one is a reference, like it says right on the cover. It has all the little details you'd want to know about any feature that otherwise you'd have to spend so much time looking for (if you can find it at all). The first three chapters are more than an overview. The first chapter gives you an overview of Word and shows you where you can find stuff in the book. The second chapter looks at all the nuts and bolts of how Word works. The third chapter shows all about customization and is worth the price of the book, in my opinion. The middle section is divided up into the menus and commands and it's very detailed. The third section shows some tasks that you can do that don't really fit into the menu chapters. To the guy who said the writer wastes time getting to the point, I don't know what you're talking about. There's almost know fluff in this whole book. Just details. And to the guy who gave it one star, I think you're problem is with the Word program and this is just not the book for you. This book is not for beginners. It says so right in the title (Power Users Reference). It doesn't teach you how to do simple things. It's for people who already know how to use Word and need a good, solid reference. Mine's dogeared all over the place!
Rating:
Summary: Every Word user should own this book
Review: O'Reilly has done it again. I use Word a lot and none of the books I've found got past the basics. In fact, most of the books I've looked at were 600-800 pages of fluff that did little more than rehash information in the Word help files. The Nutshell series has always been able to provide solid, no-nonsense advice about using software and Word 2000 in a Nutshell lives up to the Nutshell tradition. Every time I open the book, I find one of those smack myself in the head solutions for some annoying problem or a great tip for making Word do what I need it to. If you use Word, do yourself a favor and buy this book! My only complaint is that it didn't come out sooner.
Rating:
Summary: Every Word user should own this book
Review: O'Reilly has done it again. I use Word a lot and none of the books I've found got past the basics. In fact, most of the books I've looked at were 600-800 pages of fluff that did little more than rehash information in the Word help files. The Nutshell series has always been able to provide solid, no-nonsense advice about using software and Word 2000 in a Nutshell lives up to the Nutshell tradition. Every time I open the book, I find one of those smack myself in the head solutions for some annoying problem or a great tip for making Word do what I need it to. If you use Word, do yourself a favor and buy this book! My only complaint is that it didn't come out sooner.
Rating:
Summary: Half-decent Dictionary of Commands
Review: reviewed about twenty texts before selecting this one. Overall, I'm happy enough to turn in an expense report and have my firm pay for it, but still feel there is a possibility of doing a better job with writing a book. What I was looking for when I selected this book was information about how to set up a table of contents (TOC). To determine which of the twenty books on the topic was good, I looked up "table of contents" in the index at the back and the TOC. Most books simply said "Insert a table of contents using the insert menu," and that was it. This made no sense to me, as I knew I would first need to mark individual sections before generating a TOC. This book at least had some references to the related marking commands, so I selected it. When I got into the book, I found it was organized to match Word itself. It is more or less a sorted reference listing of each available command, with a few chapters in the beginning as an overview. They too, have a sorted format by major topic. This reference approach means that reading this book is a lot like reading a dictionary. The author makes no real attempt to form a thesis or maintain a single train of thought. Overall, the author gives you all the individual commands, and you have to piece them together to reach your goal. The first three chapters attempt to give an overview. These chapters could be better organized and indexed. For example, chapter one has many distinct sections, yet only four entries in the TOC. Chapter ten, well into the reference, has roughly the same number of pages, and, in contrast, roughly ten times as many TOC entries. The writing itself is choppy. The author often indulges in telling stories, making analogies, using the first person and, in general, wasting a lot of time getting to the point. He would have been well served by having an editor that had a firm grasp of how to write a simple declarative sentence. Often, one can simply skip the first one or two sentences of his paragraphs, to reach the point he is trying to make. I did not buy this book for comedy or to explore the writer's personality. I expected instruction in how to run Word. In fact, I have Word 97, even though the book is titled "Word 2000." This has caused no problems. What I think is lacking in the Word book market is a tutorial, with well chosen examples. I think the book should have some focused examples, then detail every single keystroke required to re-create them. There is a huge market for books on this topic, and I doubt this book will be the last written. By the way, the critical piece of knowledge I lacked was switching to the "Outline View." Now, at least, I can get the section numbers to increment. I still get a very odd TOC, and suspect it may not be possible to learn how to run WORD from reading instructions. I will have to find someone who has discovered the secret sequences.
Rating: 
Summary: One star is one too many!
Review: This book is a waste of my time and money. I purchased this book to learn about using Word 2000. It is poorly organized and may as well be written in Chinese. It would be great for super chip-head computer geeks perhaps, but beyond that, a complete loss. I'll take $ .50 for it.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent reference, but not a tutorial or instructions
Review: This is not a manual for Microsoft Word, and that's a good thing. Like O'Reilly's other "nutshell" books, it is a reference, a place to look when you want to know what a particular command in Word does, or how it works. Those who review it poorly because it's not user-centered or sufficiently instructional are really looking for a different book.
I've used Word for the better part of two decades, yet when I read Glenn's book in preparing to give a seminar on the application, I learned a ton about what the program is doing behind the scenes--which helped me understand and avoid some of the many frustrations I've had with Word over the years. If you're already comfortable with the program, this book will be a wealth of information. But if you're just starting out, try something else first. Track down a copy of "Word 2000 in a Nutshell" for later, when Word's idiosyncrasies start to bug you.
The book isn't perfect: the complex subject of styles based on templates, and how they interrelate when merged with other styles, could stand some more discussion. And there have been no updates for more recent versions of Word--the book is nearly five years old now, and is starting to show its age.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent reference, but not a tutorial or instructions
Review: This is not a manual for Microsoft Word, and that's a good thing. Like O'Reilly's other "nutshell" books, it is a reference, a place to look when you want to know what a particular command in Word does, or how it works. Those who review it poorly because it's not user-centered or sufficiently instructional are really looking for a different book. I've used Word for the better part of two decades, yet when I read Glenn's book in preparing to give a seminar on the application, I learned a ton about what the program is doing behind the scenes--which helped me understand and avoid some of the many frustrations I've had with Word over the years. If you're already comfortable with the program, this book will be a wealth of information. But if you're just starting out, try something else first. Track down a copy of "Word 2000 in a Nutshell" for later, when Word's idiosyncrasies start to bug you. The book isn't perfect: the complex subject of styles based on templates, and how they interrelate when merged with other styles, could stand some more discussion. And there have been no updates for more recent versions of Word--the book is nearly five years old now, and is starting to show its age.
Rating:
Summary: Not user centered in organization.
Review: Unfortunately Word 2000 is not a typical O'Reilly book. I would return the book, except I have written in it. I bought the book because I am a long time WordPerfect user that has been pushed into Word. I find Word to be a poor imitation of a word processor that lack many fine tuning controls provided in WP. I needed a book that would show me how to perform tasks that I was already familiar with. I had hoped that Walter Glenn would approach this from the user needs and then show how to navigate the confusing Word interface. Instead the book is basically a narrative organized around the menu. Granted that with a product like Word the user can do many things, but at least starting with major tasks that a user may perform would be a more useful structure. Parts 3 and 4 show promise of what could have been. I am not alone in finding the Word interface difficult. If I may quote: "The big software vendors have perpetuated some of the most illogical organizations... A widely familiar example is found in a popular word processing program that puts most formatting control under FORMAT, where a logical user would reasonably expect to find it, but requires going through the VIEW menu when it comes to headers and footers... and to the FILE menu to set page margins and some aspects of headers and footers. There are ... historical reasons for all these placements but they still make little or no sense from the standpoint of the users and their tasks. Constantine and Lockwood, Software for Use, Addison Wesley 1999, page 172. My point is that because the Word interface is flawed from user centered design, any book organized around the interface must carry a flawed organization when compared to the tasks facing the user. Power users know "what" they want to do, that should be the high level organization. This book fails to meet that expecation. It is not suitable for power, or any, user.
<< 1 >>
| 
