A different kind of book about Microsoft Word

Amazon rating: *****

Some software books try to be all things to all users, but Matthew Strawbridge's book on Microsoft Word 2007 has a much narrower focus. It has no aspirations to serve as a tutorial, and it has no aspirations to serve the needs of new users. Instead, it proclaims itself an essential reference for power users.

The book is organized around the elements of Word's user interface, which makes it very easy to find the section most likely to contain the information you're looking for. For example, there's an entire chapter on the new Microsoft Office button, a chapter on "permanent" ribbon tabs, a chapter on contextual ribbon tabs, and a chapter on task panes. There's a chapter on dialog boxes (a very long chapter!) that covers 328 different dialog boxes. There's a chapter on the Options dialog and another on the Trust Center. Separate chapters are also devoted to Word commands, keyboard shortcuts, field codes, and symbol font character sets. Additional information is presented in a series of seven appendices.
The book's title page includes the following quotation, attributed to "Anonymous": "I didn't write this; a very complex macro did." Indeed, and the book's strengths and its weaknesses derive therefrom.
The book's strengths include the following:

• The contents are very navigable for anyone familiar with Word's user interface.
• The contents are very authoritative insofar as they are harvested from Word's screentips and help system and from its user interface elements.
• The contents are liberally illustrated with screen snapshots.
• The contents seem exhaustive (and, like Word itself on occasion, exhausting).
• Wherever possible, information is presented in tables and lists for faster reference.
• Tips and other notes are sprinked liberally throughout the text.

The book's weaknesses include the following:

• Much of the information has been harvested directly from Word, which is perfectly consistent with the book's "reference" mission, but this means that independent insights are mostly limited to the tips and other notes sprinkled throughout the text.
• There is very little discussion of document structure or of relationships among the various elements found in Word documents. This is not the result of negligence, but of a deliberate effort to limit coverage to reference rather than tutorial topics.

This book has a completely different feel from any other book about Microsoft Word. It goes about its business in a very determined fashion. There are no quips or clever cartoons, just page after page, snapshot after snapshot, table after table, list after list of options, functions, descriptions.
If there's an ideal reader for this book, it is probably someone who has reached an impasse of some kind. A user confronted by an unfamiliar dialog box, for example, could quickly look up that dialog box and find a comprehensive table describing the options and functions for that dialog box. A help desk worker trying to help such a user could also benefit from the book. A true power user might prefer an online resource to a printed manual, but a power user who cracks open the book will be both entertained by and surprised at the wealth of information between its covers.

Bill Coan (Microsoft MVP and developer of the DataPrompter add-in for Word)
Reviewed in The Word MVP Site and on Amazon.com