- Date: July 28, 2001
- Full Title: Office 2001 for Macintosh – The Missing Manual / The Book that Should Have Been in the Box
- Requirements: Office 2001 for Mac or any of its components; no CD included, although Office 2001 itself comes with a whole slew of “templates” and “wizards” to explore.
- Authors: Nan Barber and David Reynolds
- Publisher: Pogue Press™/O’Reilley®
- Price: US $29.95, CDN $44.95
- Rating: Four out of Five bites of the Apple

A Bold Claim

When I first started reading this book and the attached PR material, I was very concerned. The phrase that comes recurringly in the words of the authors is, “Microsoft Gets It.” It’s in the title of the press release, it’s a heading on the very first page of the introduction of the book, and the idea is developed over the next few pages.

To a long-time user of Microsoft Office and, more particularly, of Microsoft Word, and an experienced user of Office 2001, the idea that Microsoft did finally “get it” — i.e. the idea that the majority of the engineers and developers behind the Office juggernaut are finally fully aware of what it takes to make a great Macintosh application and have turned Office into a set of such applications — is, indeed, a bit of a stretch.

Experienced users of previous versions of Office know that, for the past decade or so, the only thing that Microsoft has been able to come up with is a series of more or less successful “paint jobs” applied to a set of tools (namely Office 4.2.1 with Word 6, Excel 6, etc.) that were not in any way developed with the Macintosh in mind.

So, is there anything radically different about Office 2001 that justifies such peremptory statements of unmitigated praise? Unfortunately not. Office 2001 is not any more radically different from Office 98 than Office 98 was radically different from Office 4.2.1 — and I have already had the opportunity, in various contexts, to demonstrate the many flaws, ongoing issues, persistent bugs and major annoyances that remain an integral part of Microsoft Office — version 2001 included.

Thankfully, as I progressed through my reading of this book, I realized that this big outburst of public cheer in the PR and the introduction was not in line with the actual contents of the book.

Indeed, unlike what the PR fluff seems to indicate, this book is not really an apology of Microsoft’s approach to office computing. When Word is buggy, or uses an inappropriate approach, or bloats the user’s work environment with useless tools, the authors don’t hesitate to be quite blunt in their criticism. About the presence of a perfectly useless “Close” button in Word 2001’s standard tool bar, for example, they state:

“Like the File —> Close command, this button closes the current document and gives you a chance to save it. (It’s probably not worth asking who at Microsoft thought it might be simpler to use this difficult-to-reach, hidden-away button to close a window instead of simply clicking the Close box of the upper-left corner of every Word window or pressing cmd-W.)” (p. 33)

Overall, in fact, the book is far from being an illustration of how Microsoft finally “gets it” when it comes to office computing on the Mac. It fails to substantiate such a claim, because it fails to tackle any of the numerous essential and fundamental questions that Microsoft hasn’t been willing to answer so far, of which the following are but a minuscule sample:

Should a word processor automatically switch view modes or show/hide tool bars regardless of what the user intends to do, without permission from the user, and with no way for the user to turn off such automatic behaviors?

Should there really be three view modes — i.e. “Normal,” “Page Layout” and “Print Preview” — in order to provide the user with an accurate representation of what his document is actually going to look like?

Why do spell-checking and glossary features work across Microsoft Office applications, but cannot be used anywhere else? What’s the point of customizing your spell-checker and glossary if you still have to do the same in every other, non-Microsoft application?

Why is the “New” button in Entourage’s address book outside the area located under the heading “Address Book”?

etc.

If you are expecting the authors of this book to address such issues and, therefore, to actually demonstrate that Microsoft “gets it,” you will be disappointed — and the reason is pretty simple: they couldn’t. The conclusion, based on numerous reports of innumerable bugs, flaws, interface glitches, inconsistencies, etc., is that Microsoft still doesn’t get it. In that respect, it’s sad to see Mac writers buying into the Microsoft propaganda.

The Manual

On the other hand, when it comes to providing readers with an actual manual, i.e. something that will help the user better use the applications in their current state, regardless of whether they are compliant with Mac UI guidelines, consistent, and user-friendly — then Office 2001: The Missing Manual is actually quite successful.

In that respect, the book is true to its title: it is, first and foremost, a “manual” that explains to you how to do things, without saying whether the way to do things that the program obliges you to use is good or bad. And it does so quite well.

This manual is divided into five main parts:

Part One: Word

Part Two: Entourage

Part Three: Excel

Part Four: PowerPoint

Part Five: Office 2001 As a Whole

Predictably, since Word is by far the most complex and the most widely used of the four applications, it takes up a good half of the book. The subsections — “Basic Word Processing,” “Editing in Word,” “Formatting In Word,” “Styles, Page Layout, and Tables,” “Comments, Change Tracking, and Versions,” and finally “Advanced Word Processing” — follow a predictable, but fairly logical progression.

I find it a bit surprising that such essential features as “Headers and Footers” and “Footnotes and Endnotes” are located in the last subsection. In my experience, using headers and footers or footnotes is not really “advanced word processing,” but more like a very common task for whoever wants to design a document that’s more than a few pages long.

Any arbitrariness in the organization of the section, however, is compensated by the use of many cross-references, which should enable the user to quickly jump to his sections of interest. The book also includes a fairly good index that should make life easier for those who want quick access to a particular bit of information.

The flow of the text includes many screen shots (all in black & white) and is interrupted, on occasion, by short “tips” and “notes,” but also by bigger sidebars in a darker shade of gray, which highlight specific features or issues. Those sidebars fall into several categories: “Power Users’ Clinic,” presumably for more advanced users, “Gem in the Rough,” for somewhat “hidden” features that most users might not be aware of, “Up to Speed” for some outstanding issues that most readers are likely to be curious about, “Workaround Workshop,” “Frequently Asked Question,” etc. More intriguingly, sidebar categories also include: “Unknown Type of Sidebar” (p. 108) and “Need Sidebar Type” (p. 186)… I suspect that O’Reilly’s proof-readers had a tendency to skip over those sidebars a bit too fast. (To be fair, there are very few typos and errors in the book as a whole.)

Those categories are a debatable form of taxonomy, and are actually rather meaningless, as the main purpose of the sidebar is to attract the attention of the reader to something that takes longer to explain than what can be done in the flow of the main text.

It is also nice to see that the authors didn’t shy away from addressing some of the most glaring (and dangerous for your data) issues in Office 2001, such as the dreaded “Disk-is-Full” bug. All the same, when your basic recommendations to the average user is to “Save early, save often” by hitting cmd-S “after every paragraph or even sentence” (p. 21), it is fairly inaccurate to state that the “Disk-is-Full” bug is “reserved for people who save frequently” (p. 36), as if such people were only a small minority. I have said it before and I’ll say it again: this bug is major, it has been around for years, it can be experienced by anyone, it can lead to serious data loss, and it’s absolutely scandalous that Microsoft still hasn’t fixed it.

What’s New?

Another shortcoming of this manual is that it fails to clearly highlight what has changed in Office 2001 since the previous versions. I realize that the reasoning of the publisher is probably that most users who will want this book are people who are making the jump from, say Word 5.1 or Appleworks to Office 2001 now, and are therefore not particularly interested in the way that Word 6 or Word 98 used to do things. But if you already own a third-party book on Office 98 and are wondering whether this book is worth the “upgrade,” you should know that, apart from a few pages in the introduction, there’s nothing specifically devoted to “New in Office 2001” features, which are treated, for the most part, as other, already-in-Office 98 features.

Similarly, if you’re wondering whether this book is worth purchasing at this point in time, knowing that Microsoft will soon release a (paying) upgrade called Office 10 that runs natively under Mac OS X — well, based on what I have read so far, and if the past is any indication, there will be very few changes in Office’s features, approaches and behaviors. Aside from a few “buzz-word” features designed to attract a few new buyers and to make existing users believe the upgrade is worth the price, Office 10 for Mac OS X is likely to be an exact carbon copy (the phrase is rarely been so appropriate!) of Office 2001, only with an Aqua interface rather than the current “Platinum” scheme.

(God only knows if Office 10 will include support for more advanced OS X features, such as multithreading, or will only do the minimum required to comply with the Carbon set of APIs. Given Microsoft’s past history of compliance with Mac UI guidelines, I am not very optimistic: it is worth noting, for example, that option-clicking on the “Close” box of a Word document window still doesn’t close all currently open windows — a behavior that has been part of Apple’s guidelines since, oh, I don’t know, 1995? Who said that Microsoft “gets it”?)

Something for Everyone

I was pleased to note that the authors had taken pains to explain very clearly and repeatedly, over the course of the book, a number of basic word processing issues that still plague office computing in this beginning of a new millennium. If you still use Tab to indent the first line of a paragraph, double returns to create space between paragraphs, and scores of tab characters to align your bulleted text, then your needs will definitely be addressed by this book.

The problem is rather that, due to Microsoft’s own convoluted way of doing things and to the limitations of what can be taught to the reader through a book, I am not sure that everyone always understands exactly what they are supposed to do instead (of using double paragraphs, tabs, etc) and how they are supposed to organize their work. It would much easier to get the vast majority of computer users to comply with the very basics of modern office computing if the programs themselves didn’t make it harder than to continue with old habits that date back to the days of the typewriter. When today, young secretaries who have never seen, let alone used, a typewriter in their lives, but only modern computers running modern software, still display behaviors that so obviously hark back to the typewriter era, you know we have a major problem — but education and user manuals are only part of the equation. We also need programs designed and developed with the same goal in mind. Until then, computer book writers can only do so much to try and improve the situation.

In other words, as a manual that shows you how to do things in Word, Excel, Entourage and PowerPoint, Office 2001: The Missing Manual is quite good, but sometimes ends up sounding as complicated as the steps required by the applications, with their hundreds of dialog boxes, hidden keyboard shortcuts, cryptic buttons and unresponsive cursor icons — and I am not sure that many readers will have the patience to go through all this to learn how to do things “properly.” It bothers me, for example, that the authors use Word’s own very confusing terminology when it comes to differentiating between a “document” and a “section,” and make mistakes such as the following:

“page numbering is done on a section-by-section basis; margin settings are considered document settings” (p. 97)

While Word gives you access to them through a menu command called “Document…”, margin settings are in fact section settings, and not document settings: they can change from one section to the next. And indeed, 20 pages later, the authors do write:

“You can give each section of your document different margins” (p. 125)

I highly doubt that this will help the average reader better understand which is which, i.e. what is a document, and what is a section, and why section settings are accessed through a command called “Document…”.

Similarly, given the important role that character styles and paragraph styles should play in the work of every word processor user, it is problematic to read headings such as “Styles of Type” (p. 101) and phrases such as: “’Most font styles are available in the Formatting Palette” (the phrase actually refers to font faces). One of the basic requirements of learning is a clear terminology understood by all. Until everyone in the world of word processing refrains from using the word “style” for anything but actual word processor styles (either character or paragraph styles, both of which are available in Word 2001), I am afraid that the average user will be feeling lost as ever and will not find the courage to tackle this Grail of every word processing instructor, i.e. the mastery of styles. Fonts are fonts, font faces are font faces, text formatting is text formatting, styles are styles. Until this becomes the universal language of word-processing, word processing instructors and computer book writers will be fighting a losing battle.

Conclusion

I hope that my review clearly indicates that Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual is definitely not a bad book. On the contrary, it is well-written, it covers a lot of ground, it explores many features, offers many tips, uncovers several significant bugs and flaws — and, in the absence of a manual from Microsoft, it is clearly a good buy for the average Word user who’d like to try and learn to harness the power of this suite of applications.

This user should know, however, what to expect: the book itself does not compensate for the enormity of the complexity, unintuitiveness, inconsistency, flaws, and bugs of the product itself, and only hours and hours of experimenting, exploring, testing, scratching one’s head, cursing at stupid software behaviors, etc. — with the help of books such as Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual — will enable you to make significant progress and become, indeed, a more efficient user of the ubiquitous and inevitable juggernaut suite from Microsoft.

Rating: 4 out of 5