Chapter at a Glance

The 2008 release of Microsoft Office for Mac is one of the most sophisticated business productivity programs available today. With Office, it’s easier than ever to efficiently create a wide range of business and personal documents, from a simple letter to a complex worksheet to a professional-looking presentation. The Office programs have been designed to make powerful features more accessible, and as a result, even novice users will be able to work productively with Office after only a brief introduction.

Programs in the Office 2008 for Mac Home & Student Edition—particularly Microsoft Word 2008 for Mac, Microsoft Excel 2008 for Mac, and Microsoft PowerPoint 2008 for Mac—share many common interface elements. After you become familiar with and comfortable using one program, it will be comparatively simple to apply your experience to another.

Each of the programs that are part of Office 2008 for Mac provides several methods of giving commands when working with the program, with a file, or in a file. Three of the programs—Word, Excel, and PowerPoint—have very similar sets of tools. (In this book we’ll refer to these three programs collectively as the primary Office programs.) Microsoft Entourage 2008 for Mac shares some of the same tools, as does, to a lesser extent, Microsoft Messenger for Mac.

In this chapter, you’ll learn about tools that are common to the primary Office programs and tools that are specific to Word, to Excel, and to PowerPoint. Then you’ll learn about ways in which you can personalize the appearance and behavior of a program to best suit your needs and working style.

Practice Makes Perfect!

You won’t need any practice files to complete the exercises in this chapter. See "Using the Companion Content" at the beginning of this book for information about practice files.