Word 97 Annoyances

By Woody Leonhard, Lee Hudspeth, T.J. Lee
January 1900
Pages: 353
ISBN 10: 1-56592-308-1 | ISBN 13: 9781565923089
(Average of 0 Customer Reviews)

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Book description

Word 97 contains hundreds of annoying idiosyncrasies that can be either eliminated or worked around. Whether it's the Find Fast feature that takes over your machine every once in awhile, or the way Word automatically selects an entire word as you struggle to highlight only a portion of it, Word 97 Annoyances will show you how to solve these and many other problems.
Full Description

First, the good news: Microsoft Word is magnificently malleable. If you don't like the way a certain part of Word works, nine times out of ten all it takes is a little gumption and a bit of reading, and you can probably change things around so they work the way you want them to. Word is one of the most complex, most sophisticated, and most useful pieces of software ever created. It's there for you to mold to your way of working. You don't have to settle for the built-in stuff. Now the bad news: There's a lot of built-in stuff, and a lot of it is annoying. Part of the problem is that everyone works differently, and expects their word processor to work differently also; one user's favorite feature is another's annoyance. But there are other reasons that Word can be annoying: a difficulty (both for users and for the software developers who created Word) to make the transition from the typewriter to the computer; compatibility and the legacy of previous versions; and out-and-out poor design, to name just a few. You may be annoyed that something (it's called Find Fast) takes over your machine every so often to scan and index your files. Or that it's so difficult to select a block of text that begins in the middle of a word. Or that, when you want to select a new style for some text, a visually attractive drop-down list takes forever to appear. But whatever the immediate cause of the annoyance, what's most annoying is that it's taking you longer than you think it should to perform simple tasks. Word 97 Annoyances takes a look at many of these annoyances and shows you how to get rid of them so that you can get your work done more easily and efficiently. For instance, the book will show you how to:

Customize the toolbar so it works the way you want it to. You can create toolbars that reflect the way you work, instead of catering to the needs of Microsoft's marketing staff.
Reduce your stress level by taking an in-depth look at what makes Word tick. By understanding how Word defines sections or formats paragraphs, you can begin to understand and accept some apparent annoyances that are built into Word.
Write simple VBA programs to eliminate your own personal annoyances. For example, short VBA programs show how to disable the "Float over text" box that is always checked whenever you try to insert an image into your document.

And while making Word a more productive and easier tool to use, you'll also be enjoying a well-written, extremely humorous computer book.

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| Table of Contents | Index | Colophon

Book details

First Edition: January 1900
ISBN: 1-56592-308-1
Pages: 353
Average Customer Reviews: (Based on 0 Reviews)

Featured customer reviews

Word 97 Annoyances Review, January 10 1998
Submitted by Jack McInerney, San Jose, CA [Respond | View]

I bought this book for just one reason: the incredibly annoying "float of text" curse that occurs in Word 97 when pasting graphics. The very elegant solution (implemented through a three line macro) is worth the price of the book.

I do have one complaint about the book. The authors' style is chatty, like the Dummies books. Its not that obnoxious, but I find it annoying. The other two O'Reilly books I own(Windows 95 in a Nutshell & Practical C Programming) are much better written. They are clear, concise, fun, and insightful without all the Chatty-Cathy stuff.

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Media reviews

"Microsoft Corp.'s popular Office 97 Suite is so full of infuriating quirks that someone should write a book about it. The job turns out to take more than one volume, and publisher O'Reilly & Associates Inc. has made a lot of headway in the third and fourth titles in its series of 'Windows Annoyances' tutorials.

"Examining near-final drafts of 'Office 97 Annoyances' (due next month for $21.95) and 'Excel 97 Annoyances' (released this month at $21.95), PC Week Labs found both books well-stocked with suggestions that may cut costs of corporate support. The help is needed because, although Office may be the lingua franca of the PC-equipped workplace, it isn't an easy language to learn or to use with elegance or style.

"Like other pervasive languages, Office has grown from beginnings that never anticipated its current responsibilities. Office's history, like that of the comparably popular but equally infuriating English language, burdens users with a legacy of mixed origins and irregular rules of usage.

"Both volumes were written by Woody Leonard, Lee Hudspeth and T. J. Lee. Like William Safire's famous columns on English usage, these authors' tips reflect extensive experimentation and deep familiarity with how these products actually behave (as opposed to what their manuals say they'll do).

"These books will aid both users and corporate support staff. The level of the tutorials and recommendations ranges from the simplicity of changing annoying default settings to the challenging but also rewarding realm of streamlining tasks by means of the Office applications' embedded programming tools.

"As is the case with Office itself, the 'Annoyances' books have to address an audience of widely varying needs and abilities. The authors incline toward meeting the needs of readers who, like themselves, are above average in their expectations and in their willingness to invest a good deal of time in making Office work as they would like.

"Readers with more typical requirements may have to work a bit to see the general ideas within the specific tips, but it will be worth the effort. For example, although we don't agree with the authors' emphatic opinion that it's helpful to keep paragraph marks visible in Word, it was useful to see how the authors cleverly combined many separate program options into a single shortcut that includes display of those marks.

"Readers can use the same method to come up with their own personal views, easily accessed through a custom command, so that their preferences are neatly wrapped into a one-click operation.

"Many of the insights in the 'Annoyances' series are valuable even to users who need only the basic features of Microsoft's suite. For example, the books do a good job of laying out the limits of the macro virus protection features in Office 97, and especially of warning users about the varying options offered by different protective features in Office's tools.

"Many quirks in Office are clearly set forth in 'Office 97 Annoyances,' saving time that would otherwise be wasted in frustrating trial-and-error exploration.

"For example, the book reports (and PC Week Labs has verified) that the only way to disable pop-up tips for tool-bar icons in all Office applications is to do so from Excel. Disabling this behavior in other applications won't affect Excel, and opening Excel will incorrectly re-enable this feature in other applications until Excel is used to turn ScreenTips off.

"'Office 97 Annoyances' also clued us in to the existence of the Work menu in Word, an easily added extension to the top-level menu bar. The Work menu can accumulate a list of documents for shortcut access. Unlike the document list that's automatically offered by the File menu, file names on the Work menu aren't displaced by more recently opened files.

"The standard Work menu makes it easy to add items, but the procedure for removing items is much less obvious. 'Office 97 Annoyances' suggests a further modification to correct this oversight.

"One of the best revelations in 'Office 97 Annoyances' is that a user-written macro can 'shadow' a built-in Word command with the same name. This, combined with a fairly extensive discussion of Office's Visual Basic for Applications macro language, opens the capable but often infuriating Word to virtually unlimited adjustment of any behavior. The book accelerates this process by showing the quickest way to determine what internal command name is associated with any part of the Word user interface.

"New to Office 97 is extensive Web-style linkage, not only from local documents to the Internet but also between local and networked files. 'Office 97 Annoyances' explores the capabilities and the limits of this feature at some length.

"For example, a table summarizes the limits on 'deep hyperlinks' across documents created by different Office applications (as when linking from a Word document to a named range in a spreadsheet). Another helpful discussion explores the surprisingly powerful HTML publication features of PowerPoint.

"Finally, the weak points of Office's 'binders' and the difficulties of address-book integration are explored."

--PC WEEK, September 1997

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