Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac in a Snap (Sams Teach Yourself)

Rating:
Summary: A Very Nice Approach
Review: The In a Snap books do not presume that you are a Dummy or an Idiot. They presume that you are a smart person, not afraid of computers, but that you need to learn how to use something new, like a piece of software on your computer. Further they assume that you want to get started without having to pour through all the 1500 pages or so in the guru level book. This book takes the Office 2004 software package for the Mac computer and gives it the In a Snap approach.

In evaluating books on Office, I always look first to see if they discuss Pivot Tables in the section on Excel. A surprising number of books don't, or give them very short treatment. In this book the index sends you to page 263, that puts you right in the middle of a discussion on pivot tables. Flipping back a page or three gets you to a section called Find Relationships Between Data. What an excellent idea, that's what a pivot table really is, but doesn't have the problem of the dumb name Pivot Table. The discussion is as good as I've seen anywhere in explaining what you can use them for.

The next thing I found was inside the front cover where they have a "Contents at a Glance." This sends you to, not the page number - that's the function of the index, but to a section identified by its own numbering system. Really a handy way to get where you want to jump in to solve the problem you're having at the moment.