The book contains 1,301 pages, a 28-page Table of Contents, including a 57-page Index and three appendices. In addition to the Introduction, the book has eight parts.
The back cover of the book states:
“Get the most out of Office 2010 with this all-in-one resource. …it combines the best-of-the best content from the Excel 2010 Bible, Word 2010 Bible, PowerPoint 2010 Bible and the Access 2010 Bible.”
Contained in this book, supposedly, is everything you ever wanted to know about the Microsoft Office 2010 Programs: Excel, Word, Access, PowerPoint, Outlook, Publisher, Access and One Note.
Well, not quite.For example, in this book of 1,301 pages, 215 pages are dedicated to Excel. The Excel 2010 Bible alone contains 1,006 pages. The Word Bible contains about 900 pages whereas the Office Bible offers 217 pages on Word. The PowerPoint 2010 Bible has about 780 pages; this book, about 274 pages on PowerPoint. The Access 2010 Bible contains about 1340 pages, this book, about 236 pages, including the One Note sections. There are no Bible books about Outlook or Publisher so a comparison is not possible.
Extrapolating from the above, there is much more to each of these programs than the Office 2010 Bible contains. There’s a lot more information about the individual programs than this book contains. It is obvious that if you want complete information about the individual programs you need the Bible or similar books for each program.
The authors, all well-known with many books published on their individual programs, are: John Walkenbach, Herb Tyson, Michael R. Groh, Faithe Wempen, and Lisa A. Bucki. It is hard to determine why each author decided to include what information from their Bible books. For example, the Excel section contains information about functions and formulas. It spends many pages on Date and Time functions as well as Count and Sum formulas, but doesn’t even mention the existence of the many other types of functions, such as financial, math or engineering. The Excel Bible has18 chapters covering formulas and functions.
The Word section has eight pages dedicated to Spell Check, the Word 2010 Bible has 23 pages on Spell Check and no information at all about grammar checking. There is no mention in any of the programs for such useful things as macros.
I didn’t bother to compare the remaining programs with their more complete books because it was evident that the same would apply to them as with those mentioned above.
In general, I think the book’s sections spend too much time on fundamentals anyone familiar with Microsoft [rograms already knows. For example, the Word section discusses typing text, word wrap and the Insert/Overtype Key. There are similar examples in the other sections as well.
If you want to be a “Power User” for the Office Suite programs, you need more information about what and how the programs do what they do. This Office 2010 Bible is a decent reference book for beginners. It would have been better had it spent less time on the fundamentals and more time on the more complicated features.
Recommendations:
If you don’t need more than basic information for all of the different program’s features, this book is for you. This book works as a reference book for the more common features and is cheaper than buying each individual Bible book, but you get less for your money.
There is much more information available on each program. If you’re interested in complete information, don’t buy this book. It might be useful for the basic tools each program provides, but I think you’d do much better by investing in the Dummies type books for each program to get the same information. It might cost more to buy the individual Bible books, but if you only use Word or Excel, for example, you don’t need info on the other programs. You’ll have much more information in Bible type books treating specific programs.
Wiley Books $44.99, $29.69 @ Amazon