MS Office XP Specialist Study Guide

This book is not intended to be a general reference and it says so right at the beginning. Its purpose is to prepare people to take the MOUS (now MOS) exams and it does just exactly that. I used this book to take my Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Access exams and passed them all! The explanations in this book were clear and to the point. The exercises really helped focus on the things I needed to learn and provided a context for why I would want to use the features in the first place. I highly recommend this book if you want to be sucessful in your exams.

As an instructor of desktop applications such as Microsoft Office, I need to be able to answer question from students outside the realm of the classroom manual. Trying to keep up on the changes can sometime be very difficult to manage, that's why this book is so important to my everyday job. The book is covering Word 2002 Core & expert, Excel 2002 Core & expert, PowerPoint 2002, Outlook 2002 and Access 2002 core only and throughout the 900 plus pages there is more information on each topic, showing me things that I never knew or easier ways to do things I already know. Packed with over 350 exercises, I found out ways cut time, increase productivity and most importantly enhance both my work environment as well as the classroom. While I am not planning to take any exams in the near future, I wouldn't rule it out for next year. The book is laid out objective by objective based on the exam, and the authors have certainly made very effort to make the learning process easy to follow while providing good detail in the infromation presented. Overall some of the more advanced user may find very little addtional information, however for those with beginner to intermendiate skills this is certinaly a very good manual to have around.