Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual (Missing Manuals)

.Reviewed by C J SinghAs a longtime Windows user, but a newbie to Apple products, I have been comparing guides in the University of California, Berkeley, libraries. After studying David Pogue's  Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual  ; Mac OS X Snow Leopard: The Missing Manual ; iPhone: The Missing Manual: the fourth edition  and comparing them with several other guides, I've become a fan of the "missing manual" series. So, I pre-ordered "Office 2011 for the Mac: The Missing Manual" by Chris Grover.The 789-page missing manual covers, in detail, all four Office applications: Word, Outlook, Excel, and PowerPoint. It will serve newbies and intermediate users well. Advanced users are likely to find it too basic, except, perhaps, for an occasional reference.As a professional editor, I am impressed with the clarity of Chris Grover's writing. It takes high-level skill to achieve this. (No dummy author can write a book in the "for dummies" series -- another good series, despite its reader-denigrating subtitle.) Let's see how Grover introduces two of the basic new features in Office 2011 for the Mac, the Ribbon and Outlook, and two advanced features, Visual Basic Applications and AppleScripts.The Ribbon: "One of the most visible changes in Office programs is the ribbon -- a supercharged toolbar attached to the top of document windows (Figure I-1). The ribbon thankfully replaces the floating toolbars that seemed to multiply like rabbits with each version of Office. You'll find the most common commands logically arranged on the ribbon; tabs at the top of the ribbon organize these commands into activities. Creating a Chart? All the commands are there on the Chart tab. Best of all, there's consistency between Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. Learn your chart-making skills in one program and you can use them in the others" (page 2).Outlook: "The first thing Outlook encourages you to do is to set up an email account. If you had issues setting up an email account in the past, you're in for a pleasant surprise. In the new Outlook, the process is fairly simple, especially if your email is handled through one of the major providers such as MobileMe, Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or Hotmail. In those cases, Outlook can handle most of the complicated details. You provide your email address and password, and Outlook can identify the service and automatically set up your account. If you have an email account through your company or some less famous provider, you may have a couple of extra steps" (page 263).Visual Basic: "There's more than one flavor of Visual Basic. The rest of this chapter discusses Visual Basic for Applications, which is a scripting language that lives and operates inside of Office applications. You can't create standalone programs in VBA. That's a job for its grown-up sibling Visual Basic 2010. As you might guess, the two share many of the same concepts, so if you learn VBA, you can transfer those skills to full-blown Visual Basic" (page 450).AppleScripts: "If you're like most people, you probably didn't upgrade to Office 2011 because of its ability to work with AppleScript. But if you're not using AppleScript to streamline your complex or repetitive tasks, you're not using Office's true potential for efficiency and speed. Fortunately, you don't have to actually be a scripter to reap AppleScript's benefits, since there are hundreds of ready-made scripts you can download and use (turn first to that nexus of all things AppleScript, [...]). What follows is a quick introduction to the world of AppleScript. If you do want to learn how to write your own AppleScripts, Apple's AppleScript pages ([...]) and 'AppleScript: The Missing Manual' await" (page 644).Grover maintains this level of clarity throughout the missing manual. Five-star book.

There are few manuals out there for Mac Office 2011. This is a nicely made book and covers the fundamentals. It would be good for someone coming to Office for the first time (if there is such a person) or switching from PC to Mac.However, experienced users of MS Office for Mac know that there some persistent incompatibilities and problems which one must deal with. For example, one of the challenges is to create files that colleagues using MS Office for Windows will be able to read properly. Often graphics created in Mac version (in Word or PowerPoint) will not render properly when a PC user opens the file, giving the dreaded "Quicktime translator required" message. The first thing I did when receiving this volume was to check if more specialized issues like this are discussed. Unfortunately, no.So more for beginners than long time users.

I have no complaints, so far. Very detailed tome on Office 11 for Macs.I admit I've not read all of it, primarily concerned with learning all the tricks in Word as I pursue a part time writing career, and I'm also using it as a reference for Excel. I'm a retired municipal finance director and still do occasional contract accounting work. Also used Powerpoint quite extensively for budget presentations.Main reason I bought it: our local library system that covers all Riverside and San Bernardino County (CA) Library branches, (plus parts of a couple other counties and some city libraries), has only ONE copy available for checkout or inter-branch transfer, and it's always checked out!Although listed as used, the copy I received smells and looks as new as anything on the shelf at Barnes & Noble and at less than one third the printed retail cost. Very pleased with this purchase.

Time was, software came with a manual (I know - I used to write them). That may be news to some. These days the Missing Manual series does an excellent job of filling the gap and the "Office 2011 for Macintosh" is a joy to have, as well as an indispensable tool. I bought the Kindle version - easy to search and it covers every major and even exceedingly minor scope of every application bundled with Office. A must have for every Office 2011 user.

There is probably a lot more information in this book than I will ever need, but that's the beauty of it - it has everything I will ever need to understand the workings of Office for Mac. Having just purchased a Mac after a Dell for years, I was having problems knowing how to do some of the things that used to be second nature to me. Now I can just look up the answer...and, yes, I know that a lot of this is available online, but I don't like looking it up and then either trying to remember everything it said or print it out before I can use the directions. Love having a great reference book.

As a new user to Mac and the Microsoft's Mac version of Office, I'm trying to customize my Word and Excel toolbars to include the functions I most often use. I've had to refer to The Missing Manual several times to just find the function icons -- as the Mac version of Office is NOT intuitive. Although I found most of the information I was looking for in the "Hints" sections of the Manual, the info was there, and I was able to follow the instructions easily. For my taste, the author is a little too 'chatty' - as I prefer just the facts - I find the Manual MUCH more complete and direct than the "For Dummy's" series.

OK--I really don't know how to use my first Mac and when I loaded the Office software I immediately noted there were some differences. Called my grand daughter who walked me through a number of issues and then after she left I found more that I did not know about. Since I have used these type books before I ordered the Office 2011 for MacIntosh and have been most pleased with the book. If you are already familiar with Office on the Mac then you might want to reconsider a more advance book. This one is really elementary however that's what I needed. Good book and great buy for me.

Rated 4 rather than 5 stars because though it is very comprehensive it is very wordy with long complicated sentences in small type. It needs a firm editor to cut out all the excess verbiage. Manuals should not be written as essays in English. I'm a speed reader but even I find I'm getting brain fatigue trying to find which button to press to take an action and at 790+ pages it is very heavy. Having said that, the index is good and I have found what I needed to, when needed.

I do a lot of work in Office applications, particularly Word. And this has answered a lot of my questions. And it's very simple and easy to follow - beautifully designed guide.

Essential reference material let down by an non-intuitive index (automatically generated, I suspect). But great if you love the game of find the information if you can.

I have tried to use this book to help me use Office and while it's full of information, the basics e.g. "what does X mean?" and "how do I" are often ignored. For instance it is very clear in insisting that large photo files should be reduced when sending emails but does not explain how to do it. Isn't that what a guide is for? Also, shouldn't a guide have a glossary?

This is the book that' s absolutely essential to get the best from Office 2011 for Mac and is so well written.