Peter Coffee reviews Office 97 Annoyances for PCWeek.
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Gail Marsella reviewsOffice 97 Annoyances for CompuNotes.
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Andrew Boscardin reviews the Annoyances Series for Amazon.
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Whaddaya mean, where do I want to go today?

Microsoft keeps asking you where you want to go today? Are they kidding? You know where you want to go today, we know where you want to go today, the only group that seems to be unclear on this issue seems to be Microsoft. Sheesh! You want to get your work done and go home! Microsoft seems to have lost track of the fact that you have a "real" life and that you'd like to spend some time living it. What you want is to have your software help you get your work done so you can flip your PCs power switch to that lovely OFF position and call it a day. Your software should help you achieve this goal and therein lies the rub, as it were.

Too often the software seems to get in the way. Enter Microsoft Office. A tour-de-force of programming power. Access, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Word all standing by to let you whip through your workday. The only fly in the virtual ointment is that something seems to be wrong, if Office is the end-all be-all of application suites why does is feel that sometimes Office is more part of the problem than part of the solution? Why doesn't each application in the Office Suite work the same way? Word does something one way, Excel does the same thing only differently, Access won't do it at all, it's enough to make you scream. Don't believe it? Try moving your names and addresses from Access to Outlook and see if you don't hit a high C.

Face it, Office is amazing when it's not being so blasted annoying! Office takes up over 200 megabytes of your hard disk and sometimes logic seems to have been thrown to the winds and things just don't work like a sane rational person (that's you) would expect them to work. This (a) makes you crazy, (b) keeps you from getting your work done, which in turn causes (c) see item a. A vicious circle if we've ever seen one. Now for the good news. What you need is for someone (that's us) to show you the ropes so you can turn Office into a fine surgical tool instead of a millstone around your cyberneck. And this book will do just that. Default settings that you need to change, where to find the feature you so desperately need but has been hidden away three levels deep in some obscure dialog box, how to remove the protect-you-from-yourself-at-all-costs cotton batting that Microsoft insists on sticking into the Office machinery. How to actually employ some of this Internet hype for useful purposes... we're here for you.

The Book's Audience

Despite what you may think (depending on how long you've been working with computers) you are not stupid. Nor are you a dummy, although many a beginner has drawn this erroneous conclusion. After all, Microsoft is a big mega-buck software powerhouse, Office comes on a high-tech CD-ROM, it runs on a high speed, techno-marvel computer that rivals the Supercomputers of just a few years ago, so when things don't work right it must be you who are the dummy, right? It can't be the software, can it?

Take it from us. It's the software.

Whether you are a novice that's finally gotten that creepy feeling that maybe it's not you but Office who may be crazy, or an experienced software user that has been around long enough to know when to get fried at inconsistencies and annoying tendencies in your software applications, relief is at hand. Literally, in your hands.

This book will jump start you; help you get more out of Microsoft Office and avoid the time-wasting sink holes that are scattered liberally about its various components. If you only use one of the big five applications in Office and would like to start using the others applications that make up the suite we'll get you started. If you already are familiar with the various applications but would like to dig a bit deeper into the hot new features in this suite, we can help you too.

And if you've ever gotten annoyed with the behavior of an Office application, been driven right up the wall by some inane problem-this book is for you.