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Rating: 
Summary: Well laid out but inadequate guide for bloated Office 98
Review: I ordered the Visual Quickstart Guide with high hopes. It seemed a concise and easy to understand tome for understanding MS Office 98 for the Mac. Concise yes; maybe too concise. I've been struggling with the outline features in Word. I hoped that the book would neatly lay out how to make an outline. Nope! Nary a mention of outlines in all of the Word chapters. Frustrating. My simple Claris works made beautiful outlines, easily, quickly, and that software was free! Maybe it's just Office 98 that is a poor product. It makes many tasks harder and more frustrating than they need to be, with MANY more steps than older word processing programs, including Word 6.0. This book didn't help to dispel some of the above problems because it didn't mention how to properly perform them. In all fairness, the book is great if you know little about Office 98 and you really do just need a "Quick Start" guide. That's all it is and it's nothing more. I'm probably going to invest in one of the huge, dumbell weight Office 98 books so that I can really learn all the things I need to know to wring the most out of this frustrating software. I think MS has over-engineered Office 98. It does too many things for you! (yes, too many) And it makes others, like outlines, way too complicated. That brings up another shortcoming of the book. It tells you how to do something to an already existing document, paragraph, or work in progress. For example, I don't want to turn a paper into an outline. I want to make it an outline from the first line. The book never addresses this task. It only shows you, BRIEFLY, how to add bullets or numbers. Why not just simply show us how to do an outline in Word from the beginning of the document? Is that too difficult? Once again, my basic Clarisworks (now Appleworks) did a better job, simply and effectively. I don't make outlines frequently, but being a student means I make them often enough for presentations, papers, proposals etcetera that I want a quick, slick way to make them. This outline problem is but one example of a simple oversight by the book's authors, and a testament to the bloated nature of Office 98. I'm disappointed in the book and the software. And I was born and raised only miles from Microsoft! Viva Bill! (ha ha) If you need a guide to MS Office 98 for your Mac, save yourself the headache, get one of the BIG, comprehensive ones. I'm going to. -Cary W. in Seattle
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