Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual |  | Author: Jim Elferdink
Publisher: Pogue Press
List Price: $34.99
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Seller: Robin's Books and DVD's
Rating:  19 reviews
Sales Rank: 10300
Media: Paperback
Edition: 4th
Pages: 912
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 7 x 1.9
ISBN: 059651431X
Dewey Decimal Number: 005.5
EAN: 9780596514310
ASIN: 059651431X
Publication Date: March 20, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com Review
Still the top-selling software suite for Mac users, Microsoft Office has been improved and enhanced to take advantage of the latest Mac OS X features. You'll find lots of new features in Office 2008 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, but not a page of printed instructions to guide you through the changes. Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual gives you the friendly, thorough introduction you need, whether you're a beginner who can't do more than point and click, or a power user who's ready to tackle a few advanced techniques.
To cover Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, this guide gives you four superb books in one -- a separate section each for program! You can manage your day and create professional-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in no time. Office 2008 has been redesigned so that the windows, toolbars, and icons blend in better with your other Mac applications. But there are still plenty of oddities. That's why this Missing Manual isn't shy about pointing out which features are gems in the rough -- and which are duds. With it, you'll learn how to: - Navigate the new user interface with its bigger and more graphic toolbars
- Use Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage separately or together
- Keep track of appointments and manage daily priorities with the My Day feature
- Create newsletters, flyers, brochures, and more with Word's Publishing Layout View
- Build financial documents like budgets and invoices with Excel's Ledger Sheets
- Get quick access to all document templates and graphics with the Elements Gallery
- Organize all of your Office projects using Entourage's Project Center
- Scan or import digital camera images directly into any of the programs
- Customize each program with power-user techniques
With Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual, you get objective and entertaining instruction to help you tap into all of the features of this powerful suite, so you can get more done in less time.
Why Should I Upgrade to Office 2008 for Macintosh? Author Jim Elferdink talks about what’s new in Office 2008 for Macintosh. If you’re still using Office 2004, you’ll find some great reasons to upgrade. Jim also fills you in on some cool features that Office for Windows can’t match, and why you may not need to invest in iWork!
What are the best new features that will make folks want to upgrade to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view. If you use Word to create formatted documents like letters and brochures, you’ll find it so much easier to do now in the new Publishing Layout view than in the old Page Layout view. Publishing Layout view is actually quite similar to Pages; both are very usable. It’s a huge boon for Word people—if you haven’t bought Pages, now you won’t have to!
MyDay. I really enjoy Entourage’s MyDay feature. Assuming you’re not working on a laptop that doesn’t have screen space to spare, I recommend keeping MyDay open in the corner of your screen. That’s what I do! It helps me keep track of my appointments and schedule. If you’ve got appointments every 20 minutes or just a lot going on in your day, it’s great to have it all at a glance. It also helps you remember to go pick up the kids. (And you can feel superior to your Windows friends. There’s nothing resembling MyDay in Office for Windows.) Project Center. Entourage’s Project Center has been streamlined and beautified for 2008, but it’s still very underutilized. It takes a little extra effort to learn, but once you’ve got it up and running, if you’re doing any kind of a project that involves Office documents or even files from other programs, it’s a great timesaver. It lets you keep shortcuts to all these documents, plus email related to the project, in one window. The Project Center makes it easy to categorize email, contacts, notes, and documents. Things don’t get lost, and you don’t have to worry about Mac OS X labels and other ways to categorize things. (Office for Windows also has nothing like the Project Center.)
Formula Builder. In Excel, one of the greatest new features is the formula builder. If you use Excel much for formulas at all, especially more complicated ones, it’s really a timesaver. It helps you get those things created and working much faster than you could do before.
Elements Gallery. The Elements Gallery concept is really great because it carries over from one program to the other, gives the programs a consistent feel. If you’re using a lot of templates or AutoShapes, you’ll find it a quick way to get at all that stuff. You could do all these things before, but it was a lot harder to find what you were looking for.
So, are there any disadvantages to upgrading to Office 2008?
Publishing Layout view can be frustratingly slow on G4 Macs, especially when you’re trying to move layout elements around onscreen. I would only use it on an Intel Mac. The same caveat holds true for PowerPoint; it’s hard to move things around. But the rest of the suite works great on faster G4 machines.
Office 2008 uses the same new, XML-based file format as Office 2007 for Windows. It’s great not to have to worry when someone with Office 2007 on a PC sends you something. Office 2008 can open those documents right up. But now when you send documents to Mac folks who haven’t upgraded, they won’t be able to open them! Once you upgrade to Office 2008, you’ve got to be aware that not everyone else has, and (unless you have a real need to use the XML format) set your Save options (in Preferences) to the older format so there won’t be problems with your attachments.
Then there’s the macro problem. Any macros you wrote in earlier versions of Office use the Visual Basic programming language (VBA), and they won’t work in Office 2008! If you’ve written a lot of macros for yourself, you’ll have to stick with Office 2004 until you have time to rewrite them in AppleScript.
What do you like best about "Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual?"
I’m happy with the way this book turned out. I think it covers everything you need to use this really powerful suite of programs for all your work. One chapter I’m particularly fond of, and which I think is missing from every other PowerPoint book I’ve looked at, is Chapter 15—Planning Great Presentations. It helps you prepare for your presentation and shows you how to use PowerPoint for its true purpose. PowerPoint isn’t doing the presentation—you are. You’re the star of the show! Unfortunately, too many people think it’s the other way around.
Product Description
Still the top-selling software suite for Mac users, Microsoft Office has been improved and enhanced to take advantage of the latest Mac OS X features. You'll find lots of new features in Office 2008 for Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, but not a page of printed instructions to guide you through the changes. Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual gives you the friendly, thorough introduction you need, whether you're a beginner who can't do more than point and click, or a power user who's ready to tackle a few advanced techniques.To cover Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Entourage, this guide gives you four superb books in one -- a separate section each for program! You can manage your day and create professional-looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in no time. Office 2008 has been redesigned so that the windows, toolbars, and icons blend in better with your other Mac applications. But there are still plenty of oddities. That's why this Missing Manual isn't shy about pointing out which features are gems in the rough -- and which are duds. With it, you'll learn how to:Navigate the new user interface with its bigger and more graphic toolbarsUse Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Entourage separately or togetherKeep track of appointments and manage daily priorities with the My Day featureCreate newsletters, flyers, brochures, and more with Word's Publishing Layout ViewBuild financial documents like budgets and invoices with Excel's Ledger SheetsGet quick access to all document templates and graphics with the Elements GalleryOrganize all of your Office projects using Entourage's Project CenterScan or import digital camera images directly into any of the programsCustomize each program with power-user techniquesWith Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual, you get objective and entertaining instruction to help you tap into all of the features of this powerful suite, so you can get more done in less time.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
Great manual, but hard to use on Kindle March 3, 2010
plhgg (Arlington, MA USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
I bought this on the Kindle because there was something I was trying to do that I wanted help with right away, but there seems not to be the full index that would be in the print version -- the search function is very cumbersome in a book this large. In addition, it's slow to magnify the illustrations, and even magnified they are not that easy to read compared with a printed copy.
This is a useful manual, but in my view the Kindle version is a lousy substitute for the printed text. I've since learned that there is an online version that can be used for free for a limited time -- if I had known that, I could have used it while waiting for the printed version to come; as it is, I'm going to grit my teeth and buy the printed version.
Even though I consider the Kindle version inadequate, though, I've read enough to be sure that this is a fine manual, just one that has enough in it that flipping through pages (and consulting a real index) will be preferable to reading on the Kindle (I love the Kindle for novels or ordinary nonfiction, but I don't find it acceptable for this sort of reference work).
 perfect companion for soft. December 30, 2009
Ling Y. Zeng (Washington DC)
This books is a must-have one in hand if you use office 2008 for mac.
It's easy to use and depicts in detail every features of software.
 Only for people looking to do complex stuff December 12, 2009
Hal Jordan (USA)
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
If you are new to Macs (as I am) or new to Office (there probably aren't many of those folks around these days), this book is not for you. The author assumes that a) you know OS X very well; and b) you know the Windows version of Office very well. I was looking for a book that would quickly get me up and running in Office 2008 for Mac after I recently bought my first iMac. This book was definitely not what I needed. He has no explanation of some of the simple stuff I need to know, such as how to create new folders. Apparently, it doesn't work the way is does with Office for Windows, where you can create a new folder as part of the process of saving a file. Or if it does work that way, it's not evident. A couple of the other reviews note other simple stuff that he doesn't bother to explain. His intended audience is apparently people who have fairly complex documents to create and who need to know how do that on a Mac after having already become familiar with OS X. If that describes you, this book may be useful. What's a bit misleading is that some of these Missing Manual books actually do lead you through the basics (I'm thinking here of the iPhone book in particular). I should probably have bought the For Dummies book, which is what I'm about to do.
Nice book, faster than an internet search November 14, 2009
J. Bossart (Austin, TX)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
As a reasonably experienced Office 2007 user I was constantly fighting to find solutions to "quirks" with the Office 2008 suite for Mac (i.e., what's the comparable Office 2008 key stroke for F-4 in Excel? Surprise, it's CMD-T). Don't let them fool you, the PC version of Office is much more versatile than the Mac version; but the Mac has more than enough virtues to overcome these deficiencies.
After spending too much time looking for answers on the internet (too many threads ending up in dead ends) I decided to purchase the PDF version of this book. The key information is now available to me quickly in the office and on the road. Time is saved and it's much less frustrating.
This book is well suited to quickly finding answers and solutions with Office 2008. I'm not sure it is as useful as a self learning introduction to Office 2008.
essential reading November 4, 2009
K. P. Knight (Teasdale, UT USA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"Office 2008 for Macintosh, The Missing Manual" is just that: the manual you should have gotten with the product. They say that MS Word is the most complex program ever, and we've managed to navigate a few of its complexities thanks to this book. It's paid for itself many times over. Plus, some of the writing has a humorous edge that makes all that painful learning more palatable.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 19
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