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#1
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Word 2003 User's Guide
Does Word 2003 ship with a User's Guide or Manual in digital form apart
from the Help file? Awhile ago a book was shipped with Word Software, but today w/ MS Licensing, only CDs. TIA! ~Terry |
#2
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Terry
No manual comes with Word or Office - just a quick install guide. There are many tutorials on line under Help - but even these aren't that easy to find. -- Terry Farrell - Word MVP http://word.mvps.org/ "Terry Drewes" wrote in message ... : Does Word 2003 ship with a User's Guide or Manual in digital form apart : from the Help file? Awhile ago a book was shipped with Word Software, : but today w/ MS Licensing, only CDs. : : TIA! : ~Terry |
#3
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Hi TF!
That's a bummer! :-( ...Just about every other software program gives you a PDF on the installation CD to view and print out a User's Guide. Oh well. Ciao! ~Terry TF wrote: Terry No manual comes with Word or Office - just a quick install guide. There are many tutorials on line under Help - but even these aren't that easy to find. |
#4
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The current thinking on what Microsoft calls User Assistance is that it
should be dynamic. For that reason, even the offline Help file is somewhat limited (and being increasingly pared down to the most-often-searched-for information. The rest is available online. If you have a persistent (or even convenient) connection to the Internet, this can be quite handy because Microsoft is continuously adding new Help articles that will be found by searching online through your built in Help task pane. The UA people meet monthly with Word MVPs to determine the current "pain points" and FAQs so that they (and we) can write new articles to address them. If you don't have constant, easy, or fast access to the Internet (as we keep futilely emphasizing to MS is the case for many users), this can be a bummer. One thing we have repeatedly suggested to MS is that the added content be made available in the form of downloadable updates to the Help file. Perhaps this will be incorporated in a future version. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Terry Drewes" wrote in message ... Hi TF! That's a bummer! :-( ...Just about every other software program gives you a PDF on the installation CD to view and print out a User's Guide. Oh well. Ciao! ~Terry TF wrote: Terry No manual comes with Word or Office - just a quick install guide. There are many tutorials on line under Help - but even these aren't that easy to find. |
#5
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G'Day Suzanne,
I find your comments very informative - had no idea that MS had so dynamic an approach. However Beginner Education (BE) is just as important to me as UA. BE (for me) is a form of Product Description, covering topics like: Here is Word, its MAIN features are... It will do this.....if you...... As a start, the best way to........however you may also... (The first Book I bought on Word (v6 - Que?) ran to 1400 or 1600 pages and I never needed another.) UA (for me) covers topics like: When I try to use this feature.....this happens.....why? I am unable to......as advertised....why? I note that.....Word can.....I need more information. There seems to be a bug...... (and sometimes there is!) I strongly believe that the "Boxed" version of Office should include the PDF versions of... MS Press - Word xxxx Inside Out MS Press - Excel xxxx Inside Out MS Press - Outlook xxxx Inside Out : (Each Book includes a PDF copy of itself on the accompanying CD already.) As an example, Office 97 Pro came with a printed book "Developing Applications with Access 97". It covered (the then NEW) VBA in Access, and was a priceless guide to Access at that time. It used the two sample database apps as its basis, and would STILL give an excellent grounding in the product. There was an HTML version on the CD. I used it as a training resource for many years. I was refused permission to distribute it free to trainees then and recently - although it has never been offered for sale. -- Regards, Pat Garard Australia _______________________ "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message ... The current thinking on what Microsoft calls User Assistance is that it should be dynamic. For that reason, even the offline Help file is somewhat limited (and being increasingly pared down to the most-often-searched-for information. The rest is available online. If you have a persistent (or even convenient) connection to the Internet, this can be quite handy because Microsoft is continuously adding new Help articles that will be found by searching online through your built in Help task pane. The UA people meet monthly with Word MVPs to determine the current "pain points" and FAQs so that they (and we) can write new articles to address them. If you don't have constant, easy, or fast access to the Internet (as we keep futilely emphasizing to MS is the case for many users), this can be a bummer. One thing we have repeatedly suggested to MS is that the added content be made available in the form of downloadable updates to the Help file. Perhaps this will be incorporated in a future version. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Terry Drewes" wrote in message ... Hi TF! That's a bummer! :-( ...Just about every other software program gives you a PDF on the installation CD to view and print out a User's Guide. Oh well. Ciao! ~Terry TF wrote: Terry No manual comes with Word or Office - just a quick install guide. There are many tutorials on line under Help - but even these aren't that easy to find. |
#6
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However Beginner Education (BE) is just as important
to me as UA. I can recall when every new version of Word came with a tutorial disk or book. I found these quite helpful. Now, except for its online articles, Microsoft leaves this type of documentation to third parties, and quite a few authors have made a lucrative business of it (think of Woody et al.). Microsoft's assumption (which is valid to some extent) is that most users of new versions of Office are not new Office users. Most of us upgrade from Word 2002 to 2003 (or 97 or 2000 to 2003) and already know how to do most of what we need to do. What I would really like to see is an extension of the "What's New in Word xxxx" KB articles. There's usually one such for each version (though it sometimes takes a while to come out), but it's mostly a list of the features with some marketing hype, not any explanation of why you might want to use the features, much less how to implement them. It could be argued that if you get a list of the new features and some of them sound interesting, you can then investigate them in the Help file or in online articles; the problem with that is that the Help is usually (a) mostly inherited from previous versions and (b) prepared at the last minute when the feature set is final and consequently doesn't always have adequate documentation of new features, and articles about them are often slow to appear because UA is still figuring them out, too. (Presumably designers and developers, who dream up these new features, are not qualified to write the documentation.) Third-party books often focus on new features because the author has almost certainly participated in beta testing, which focuses on these new features. The problem here is that, given publishing deadlines (the goal is to have the books hit the streets at the same time as the software), the descriptions and instructions are often wrong, either because a feature received last-minute tweaking or because it couldn't be made to work reliably at all and was dropped. To get some idea what all these writers are up against, consider these analogies: 1. Trying to write a newspaper description (on deadline) of a protean beast that keeps changing shape before your eyes. 2. Trying to make a fitted wedding dress for a bride who has gained or lost 10 or 15 pounds every time she comes in for a fitting. See also http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WheresTheManual.htm -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Pat Garard" apgarardATbigpondDOTnetDOTau wrote in message ... G'Day Suzanne, I find your comments very informative - had no idea that MS had so dynamic an approach. However Beginner Education (BE) is just as important to me as UA. BE (for me) is a form of Product Description, covering topics like: Here is Word, its MAIN features are... It will do this.....if you...... As a start, the best way to........however you may also... (The first Book I bought on Word (v6 - Que?) ran to 1400 or 1600 pages and I never needed another.) UA (for me) covers topics like: When I try to use this feature.....this happens.....why? I am unable to......as advertised....why? I note that.....Word can.....I need more information. There seems to be a bug...... (and sometimes there is!) I strongly believe that the "Boxed" version of Office should include the PDF versions of... MS Press - Word xxxx Inside Out MS Press - Excel xxxx Inside Out MS Press - Outlook xxxx Inside Out : (Each Book includes a PDF copy of itself on the accompanying CD already.) As an example, Office 97 Pro came with a printed book "Developing Applications with Access 97". It covered (the then NEW) VBA in Access, and was a priceless guide to Access at that time. It used the two sample database apps as its basis, and would STILL give an excellent grounding in the product. There was an HTML version on the CD. I used it as a training resource for many years. I was refused permission to distribute it free to trainees then and recently - although it has never been offered for sale. -- Regards, Pat Garard Australia _______________________ "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message ... The current thinking on what Microsoft calls User Assistance is that it should be dynamic. For that reason, even the offline Help file is somewhat limited (and being increasingly pared down to the most-often-searched-for information. The rest is available online. If you have a persistent (or even convenient) connection to the Internet, this can be quite handy because Microsoft is continuously adding new Help articles that will be found by searching online through your built in Help task pane. The UA people meet monthly with Word MVPs to determine the current "pain points" and FAQs so that they (and we) can write new articles to address them. If you don't have constant, easy, or fast access to the Internet (as we keep futilely emphasizing to MS is the case for many users), this can be a bummer. One thing we have repeatedly suggested to MS is that the added content be made available in the form of downloadable updates to the Help file. Perhaps this will be incorporated in a future version. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Terry Drewes" wrote in message ... Hi TF! That's a bummer! :-( ...Just about every other software program gives you a PDF on the installation CD to view and print out a User's Guide. Oh well. Ciao! ~Terry TF wrote: Terry No manual comes with Word or Office - just a quick install guide. There are many tutorials on line under Help - but even these aren't that easy to find. |
#7
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Hi Suzanne,
There is, I guess, one thing that most people would find useful in this "incremental" world. That would be a periodic re-assessment of where we have arrived at. A "once again" this is where we are at with Word..... -- Regards, Pat Garard Australia _______________________ "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message ... However Beginner Education (BE) is just as important to me as UA. I can recall when every new version of Word came with a tutorial disk or book. I found these quite helpful. Now, except for its online articles, Microsoft leaves this type of documentation to third parties, and quite a few authors have made a lucrative business of it (think of Woody et al.). Microsoft's assumption (which is valid to some extent) is that most users of new versions of Office are not new Office users. Most of us upgrade from Word 2002 to 2003 (or 97 or 2000 to 2003) and already know how to do most of what we need to do. What I would really like to see is an extension of the "What's New in Word xxxx" KB articles. There's usually one such for each version (though it sometimes takes a while to come out), but it's mostly a list of the features with some marketing hype, not any explanation of why you might want to use the features, much less how to implement them. It could be argued that if you get a list of the new features and some of them sound interesting, you can then investigate them in the Help file or in online articles; the problem with that is that the Help is usually (a) mostly inherited from previous versions and (b) prepared at the last minute when the feature set is final and consequently doesn't always have adequate documentation of new features, and articles about them are often slow to appear because UA is still figuring them out, too. (Presumably designers and developers, who dream up these new features, are not qualified to write the documentation.) Third-party books often focus on new features because the author has almost certainly participated in beta testing, which focuses on these new features. The problem here is that, given publishing deadlines (the goal is to have the books hit the streets at the same time as the software), the descriptions and instructions are often wrong, either because a feature received last-minute tweaking or because it couldn't be made to work reliably at all and was dropped. To get some idea what all these writers are up against, consider these analogies: 1. Trying to write a newspaper description (on deadline) of a protean beast that keeps changing shape before your eyes. 2. Trying to make a fitted wedding dress for a bride who has gained or lost 10 or 15 pounds every time she comes in for a fitting. See also http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/General/WheresTheManual.htm -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Pat Garard" apgarardATbigpondDOTnetDOTau wrote in message ... G'Day Suzanne, I find your comments very informative - had no idea that MS had so dynamic an approach. However Beginner Education (BE) is just as important to me as UA. BE (for me) is a form of Product Description, covering topics like: Here is Word, its MAIN features are... It will do this.....if you...... As a start, the best way to........however you may also... (The first Book I bought on Word (v6 - Que?) ran to 1400 or 1600 pages and I never needed another.) UA (for me) covers topics like: When I try to use this feature.....this happens.....why? I am unable to......as advertised....why? I note that.....Word can.....I need more information. There seems to be a bug...... (and sometimes there is!) I strongly believe that the "Boxed" version of Office should include the PDF versions of... MS Press - Word xxxx Inside Out MS Press - Excel xxxx Inside Out MS Press - Outlook xxxx Inside Out : (Each Book includes a PDF copy of itself on the accompanying CD already.) As an example, Office 97 Pro came with a printed book "Developing Applications with Access 97". It covered (the then NEW) VBA in Access, and was a priceless guide to Access at that time. It used the two sample database apps as its basis, and would STILL give an excellent grounding in the product. There was an HTML version on the CD. I used it as a training resource for many years. I was refused permission to distribute it free to trainees then and recently - although it has never been offered for sale. -- Regards, Pat Garard Australia _______________________ "Suzanne S. Barnhill" wrote in message ... The current thinking on what Microsoft calls User Assistance is that it should be dynamic. For that reason, even the offline Help file is somewhat limited (and being increasingly pared down to the most-often-searched-for information. The rest is available online. If you have a persistent (or even convenient) connection to the Internet, this can be quite handy because Microsoft is continuously adding new Help articles that will be found by searching online through your built in Help task pane. The UA people meet monthly with Word MVPs to determine the current "pain points" and FAQs so that they (and we) can write new articles to address them. If you don't have constant, easy, or fast access to the Internet (as we keep futilely emphasizing to MS is the case for many users), this can be a bummer. One thing we have repeatedly suggested to MS is that the added content be made available in the form of downloadable updates to the Help file. Perhaps this will be incorporated in a future version. -- Suzanne S. Barnhill Microsoft MVP (Word) Words into Type Fairhope, Alabama USA Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so all may benefit. "Terry Drewes" wrote in message ... Hi TF! That's a bummer! :-( ...Just about every other software program gives you a PDF on the installation CD to view and print out a User's Guide. Oh well. Ciao! ~Terry TF wrote: Terry No manual comes with Word or Office - just a quick install guide. There are many tutorials on line under Help - but even these aren't that easy to find. |
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