Office 2011 for Macintosh by Chris Grover


Summary: get these ribbons working fine ;)

Microsoft Office 2011 is a big leap in Mac world. It is faster, more stable and filled with lots of new features. It has a new look and feel as well. If you are like me, you’d rather stay with old good interface you have gotten used to. On the other hand, world will not wait and you have to follow the trend. This is the place were Office 2011 for Macintosh comes in handy. It helps you adapt to new circumstances, to completely redesigned user interface. I will not discuss the whole book here, because I don’t use Outlook and Power Point at all – I simply don’t belong to target group for these two products. However, when it comes to Word and Excel I can tell that Chris have done really good job. You will get basic information related to creating documents, templates, manipulating ribbon (quite useful), using style (believe me, I know people who format documents using Enter and space). Book discusses topics related to references and references management. This is really great feature that Pages ’09 miss and makes Office better suited for scientific papers (unless you can not imagine anything else than LaTeX). Huge advantage of 2011 version is Visual Basic that was not available in 2008 edition for Mac. This is really, really huge step forward for Microsoft Office in Mac world. It makes this suite even more interesting. Chris touches slightly this topic, however you will be left unfulfilled. I’d recommend here Microsoft Office Excel 2007 Visual Basic for Applications Step by Step instead – if you are interested in Visual Basic programming. However, it’s nice of Chris that he touches this topic as it is definitely worth mentioning. What I have found really interesting was explanation of pivot tables. Pivot tables are the endless topic of miss understanding. Lots of people can not get used to use them. Chris explains this topic very clearly and covers it with lots of examples. After reading this chapter you should say that you don’t understand pivot tables no more. I really enjoyed reading this book. I like the way material is presented – nicely formatted content, lots of examples, simple language. Keep in mind, however, that book addresses beginners and it doesn’t cover all the aspects of Microsoft Office 2011.

Product page:

O’Reilly: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9781449393359/
Amazon (in Books): Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual
Amazon (Kindle): Office 2011 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual