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Best Office resource book for advanced problem solving

Anonymous
2019-07-26T17:27:46+00:00

I used to purchase a thick manual written by Microsoft Office experts with each new major upgrade.  With Office 365 and continual upgrades, I haven’t done so recently.  Online searches are often helpful, but I would like to purchase the BEST resource for quick lookup of an answer to small but increasingly time consuming problems.

As an example, I just purchased a new computer for my wife.  Office 365 is installed and working, but some things are not working the way we set them up on her old computer.  (some good, like all of her typing keys now work!) We use an Excel spread sheet for tenant information.  We use a Word document and a mail merge to create invoices.  The Word merge no longer remembers the path and file name.  I have done several quick searches, but finding no answer and our time crunch we have simply continued clicking through the file structure to find the Excel document each time we use the Word invoice document. 

I would love to have a thick manual or Kindle Book to be able to solve such problems.  Thanks for any good suggestions.  

I did purchase “Office 365 for IT Pros.” Even if it means purchasing separate books for Word, Excel, and Access, I need well indexed answers to question about things we don’t do often, like setting up a merge, but when not working create an irritating frustration that “this should be easy.”

Microsoft 365 and Office | Word | For home | Windows

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  1. Charles Kenyon 166.8K Reputation points Volunteer Moderator
    2019-07-26T18:25:34+00:00

    I am sure that there is no "best" book or series of books. Everything about Word would require a multi-volume series of books. Likewise with Excel. These programs have been incredibly complex for many years.

    In the way they work, Word and Excel in Office 365 are not greatly different from Office 2003 even though the interface has changed and MS has added lots of bells and whistles to attract the corporate accounts.

    Recently, I have very much liked the Word in Depth series by Faithe Wempen. The last one in that series was for 2016.

    This forum is an excellent resource.

    Another would be the Mail Merge forum.

    I use mail merge on a regular basis and have no problem with a primary merge document forgetting the data source.

    However, I usually use a macro that converts a regular word document to a primary merge document and attaches my principal data source. This is because I use templates for the primary and usually make changes to a new document before performing the merge rather than always using the same merge. When I reopen one of these documents, the data source is remembered.

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  2. Anonymous
    2019-07-26T20:21:07+00:00

    Dear Daniel

    I am an independent advisor, and I am trying to help other users in Community with my experience in Microsoft products.

    If you want a big manual (get help) you can use one that is built in https://support.office.com/en-us/article/where-...

    There is also a tell me option https://support.office.com/en-us/article/do-thi...

    As for new releases and changes you can find here https://support.office.com/en-gb/article/what-s...

    There are also tech blogs, for example for Outlook https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Outlook-...

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