Leonhard covers the major Office 2000 members--Word, Excel, Outlook, and PowerPoint--but neglects Access, FrontPage, and the other programs that ship with the higher-end variants of Office. In his coverage of the four biggies, he explains how to get things done with the essential pieces of the programs before taking on more obscure features. Leonhard's advice is rock-solid and to the point. If the author thinks something about Office is poorly designed or hard to use, he'll let you--and Microsoft--know, and then he'll show you the best way to get around the sticking point. --David Wall

Pretty good, but not advanced   September 2, 2000

Just starting with Office? You'd love this book. Looking for solutions to big troubles (being not a beginner)? Continue searching, please.


Buy This Book   July 11, 2000
  5 out of 7 found this review helpful

I wasted two nights trying to get E-Mail to operate under Office 2000 Outlook program - all to no avail. I was in E-Mail contact with MSN support and got no help; they actually gave me incorrect instructions. I was then ping-ponged around between two Microsoft support numbers. Finally, this book arrived via UPS from Amazon. With the book's clear directions, and a little patience, I was able to get E-mail going. I had other texts but they were useless in solving a "simple problem" like E-mail installation under Microsoft Office's Outlook 2000 program. My hat's off to this guy. It's an exceptional book.


a book you can actually read   June 17, 2000
  35 out of 35 found this review helpful

Microsoft Office is clearly a passion for Woody Leonhard. He loves the suite for what it can do, but minces no words when it comes to taking Microsoft to task for what he considers [poor or useless] design decisions. He writes in a first person style that is refreshing, and dosn't talk down to the reader.

Most importantly, he starts with the premise that readers (and users of the program) are smart. He has little patience for design or settings that he sees as "dumbing down" the program for the masses. He makes specific and for the most part intelligent suggestions for changing the program interface and defaults to make it useful. In particular he recommends toolbar changes that mirror what actual users need as opposed to "gee wiz features"

Leonhard is highly opinionated in his choices, but he is not autocratic. He explains the reasoning behind a suggestion so a reader can say, "That's good" or "I think that won't work for me".

This book is probably *not* for the user who routinely buy "______ for dummies"

I think the strongest feature of the book for me is the unevenness of his topic coverage compared to the many other books on the market. It is not easy to categorize it as a beginner's book or an advanced book because the depth of coverage on any particular topic varies tremendously. If Woody Leonhard thinks a feature is extremely useful, or something that will be used repeatedly, his treatment may be exhaustive-going beyond even the typical coverage in an advanced book. He may thus skim features he considers of marginal utility. He is also excellent in explaining important features that are made unnecessarily difficult by poor design decisions by Microsoft.

Woody has little patience with cute feature names chosen by Microsoft--like "my computer" or my documents"--and he is free with his displeasure. Having worked with many of Mr. Leonhard's books, I recognize that his choices about what to lambaste are not always correct. While he is pretty good about seeing the diamond in the lump of coal, sometimes his annoyance can make him slow to see a useful paradigm shift buried in seemingly unuseful changes. Paradoxically, he sometimes he jumps on something new and is overtaken by his gee-wiz enthusiasm and don't see real problems with the concept or implementation.

If you have no patience to ready any book or manual, and you just want a encyclopedia stlyle reference this may not be the best book for you.

This book is perfect if you are already familiar with your computer and you need to quickly come up to speed on Microsoft Office 2000. I was already pretty expert with Word but used Excel like it was Lotus 1-2-3 with a different interface. I went through the Excel portion of Woody Leonhard Teaches Microsoft Office 2000 and it turned me into an Excel enthusiast and an almost expert user.

Specifically, he introduced the auditing toolbar right off the bat as a beginner's feature. Other books treat this as a very advanced feature. But Mr. Leonhard was absolutely correct. I now can trust my spreadsheets and especially know very quickly what I have done wrong when they don't work. This one insight that no one else provided was, for me, worth the price of the book.

If you are going to only buy one book on Office 2000, you may want to spend some time in the book store reading through a few topics to get a feel for Leonhard's style--nd decide whether it is compatible with yours. I imagine that some could consider his lack of bland objectivity to be an impediment. Others may find his idiosyncratic writing style tiresome and sophomoric. It's also true that unless you are a total computer novice, "you can't go wrong" with Woody Leonhard's book. It gets the teaching job done.

I don't always buy one of Woody Leonhard's books as my first book on a subject, but if I have two on that subject, inevitably one will be his.


Woody Leonhard is a MUST for beginner to intermediate users   December 8, 1999
  16 out of 18 found this review helpful

This book is probably the best, most comprehensive teaching aid to a software program that I have ever read. This book has made transferring from WordPerfect suite to Office 2000 as easy as it can get.


Outstanding   August 17, 1999
  8 out of 13 found this review helpful

I have bought previous books by this author, but this one is just his greatest piece of work. Every one should own this book . It simple OUTSTANDING