Rating: 

Description
Word 2007: The Missing Manual not only explains basics like how to create documents, enter and edit text, format, print, and fax, but also learn how to create sophisticated page layouts, insert forms and tables, use graphics, and create book-length documents with outlines and Master Documents. Coverage also includes how to share documents with other people and programs, create web pages, automate documents with fields, and automate tasks with macros and the Visual Basic scripting language. This book shows you how to do it all.

The description above is about right. This book explains basics and teaches more advanced concepts. Collaboration and sharing are the main new and important issues with Office 2007, so Word 2007 is an important piece of that pie. I do not know if “This book shows you how to do it all.”, but it does show you quite a number of things that are necessary to know to get more out of Word.

My experience agreed with almost everything written. I have been a Word user for many years and find it to be everything I need in a word processing program. I thought the Introduction had a succinct review of the ribbon, Building Blocks, Live Preview, file format changes, and a few others that are really minor changes. Increased security in Word 2007 is welcome but let’s wait until the fat lady sings.

The topics start with ‘The Missing Credits, then moves to Introduction to Part One (Chapters 1 through 7), Part Two (Chapters 8 through 12), Part Three (Chapters 13 through 16), Part Four (Chapters 17 through 20), and Part Five, the Appendix. All parts are well organized, outlined, and logical.

This is not a complicated book, but has a lot of action in it. If you read it and do what it explains, then many easy actions remain easy instead of not quite so accurate memories of what you should do in certain circumstance. Expressive examples are seen throughout this book.

Chapter 18: Changing your security settings is one of the better chapters. Digital signatures, Trust Center, and Removing Personal Information are worth the cost of the book.

Chapter 19: Introducing macros and visual basic was my favorite chapter. The Developer tab, recording macros, running macros, and testing macros were very well written. Reading Visual Basic code and using Digital signatures were good too. Getting help was well done. I hope developers get a lot of use out of this chapter. Another one that is worth the cost of the book.

The 522+ pages were easy to read and understand, partly told as a story. I read it in 3 days. There were typos and grammar errors, starting on page 4 with ‘yougraduate’ (in the last paragraph on that page). This should not cause alarm in many books, but Word is one. If this is an editing or printing error, I apologize in advance, but if the author of a book on Word does not use the spelling and grammar checker, or does not believe the red squiggly underline and take action, then this starts to make me feel uneasy about his expertise. I’m not going to go over all the errors, someone else can do that but this is the only one of the four Missing Manual books I have reviewed where I have a concern about the expertise and thoroughness of the author and book.

I would recommend you get this book. It will pay for itself the first time the Internet goes down, you work offline using Word 2007, and you need help. This book can do that for you.

Frederick J Eccher Jr
MBA
M.S. Management of Information Systems
A.B. Psychology
B.A. Biology
CIO, Community Partners
President, Board of Directors, Saint Louis Visual Basic Users Group
rick@stlvbug.net