Mac OS X Tiger: Missing Manual

iPhoto 5: Missing Manual

Microsoft Office 2004 for Mac OS X : Visual QuickStart Guide (Visual Quickstart Guides)

Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

Mac Osx

Office 2004 for Macintosh (Missing Manual)

Format: Paperback
Author: Mark Holt Walker
ReleaseDate: 09 February, 2005
Publisher: Pogue Press
Rating:

Disappointing
I had expected a reference of the caliber of David Pogue's Mac OS X Tiger manual. This book was a disappointment. Among problem areas: a hard-to-navigate and incomplete index, fuzzy photo insets, and incorrect cross-references. The manual has the feel of something put together in a hurry without proper proof-reading, and borrowing heavily from canned sources. I learned some things but had to work harder to glean the information than I should have. I would not recommend this manual, unless it's the only game in town. I don't think it is.

Beware the mistakes
Previous books have given me lots of insights into my installed software and have made my computing time much more efficient. I am a big fan of the Missing Manual series. I therefore approached this book with much enthusiasm. Office is such a gargantuan program, with tons of bells and whistles, that Microsoft itself estimates that most users take advantage of less than a third of its capabilities.

However, the book is a major disappointment, because of its many mistakes and poor organization. Most of the mistakes are ones you can work around--for example, on page 8 the topics covered by appendixes A and B are reversed--but the sheer number of such mistakes makes reading the book a major distraction. Every few pages I find myself going to the Missing Manuals web site to report yet more errata, such as incomplete or wrong instructions, figures that do not agree with the text or figure captions, incomprehensible writing, seeming confusion between the Mac and PC versions of the program, etc. And I agree wholeheartedly with a previous reviewer who complained about the inadequate index.

It looks as though O'Reilly Publishers did not do an adequate proofing of the book, but instead rushed it out as soon as possible. That is too bad, because I will now be much more hesitant to purchase another Missing Manuals title.

Good book crippled by inadequate index
The book itself is quite decent, though not as well written as the OSX guide. I was impressed by the other 'Missing Manual' book which I have read, their guide to OSX, and had high hopes for this one. However, it is crippled by a totally inadequate index. First, the way in which the index is organized makes little sense -- some Word topics are listed alphabetically on their own, while others are grouped together as sub-entries under 'Word', forcing you to look in several different places. Far worse, the index is simply incomplete, making it difficult if not impossible to look up the answers to specific questions.

For instance, let's say you want to look up how to use all those little triangle widget things on the ruler. There's just one entry for 'ruler' as a sub entry under 'Word' (and none as a stand-alone entry): page 22. Page 22 contains just two lines about the ruler, with the injunction to "See page 116 for details on how to use and change these settings". As it happens, there's nothing at all on page 116 about the ruler, and the reference should probably be to page 130, which contains a discussion of margins. But typos aside, the main issue is, why isn't the page which contains the actual information about how to use the various features of the ruler listed in the index under 'ruler'? This is typical of the grossly incomplete indexing which makes this book nearly useless as a problem-solving guide. The index is simply too short, with only a total of about three pages devoted to all of the Word entries.

The Pogue Press/O'Reilly people should really create a proper index (how difficult can this be to do on a book which was doubtless created in electronic form by people who are presumably intimately familiar with the use of Word 2004) and post it on their website. That would at least make it possible to use the book as a reference source.

Note: the above comments are based on the third of the book devoted to Word. I assume that the same problems exist in the other sections, but I bought the book primarily to use with Word and haven't worked in detail with those other sections.