Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual
by Nan Barber & David Reynolds, Pogue Press, 2001; ISBN: 0-596-00081-2)
Week 19 (Nov. 11th, 2002)

      When it comes to computers, I’m a dinosaur. This is embarrassing to admit, writing as I do for a website, but until two weeks ago this column was brought to you (on my end, at least) on an ancient DOS word-processing program, WordPerfect 5.0. Yes, that’s right: DOS, pre-Windows, a relic from the 1980s.

      Did I feel deprived? Not a bit. Frankly, I stayed with WordPerfect by choice. Primitive though it may have been, it still had about a thousand more gig-a-whoosies than I ever needed as a novelist. On this prehistoric software, I managed to write six novels, one non-fiction book on F. Scott Fitzgerald, two “novelizations” for the movies (“The Mexican” and “Insomnia”), and a whole bunch of other stuff as well – better yet, I sold them too. In short, WordPerfect suited me perfectly. Finally, it was lack of technical support that drove me to update rather than any insufficiency on the part of my beloved program that I understood so well. I mean, just try to find a printer these days that can commingle electronically with DOS! The computer industry, of course, wants our money; they’re pleased as punch for our machines to become obsolete almost instantly.

      So, lo and behold, this dinosaur finally was forced to join the modern age. I went from PC to Mac, partly because I have a group of friends who are ardent Mac-o-Maniacs. “You’ll love Mac!” they cried, and I was seduced. I found a good price on a cute little laptop, one of the new iBooks, from an online dealer and I was thrilled to become a very modern person. Just teach me, I said. That’s all I require. So imagine my sinking sensation when I opened the box to find a miniscule instruction brochure that was exactly 35 pages long, mostly pictures. I’m into brevity, as long as brevity is not taken to an extreme. But this was absurd. To be honest, I bought a push lawn mower recently that arrived with a thicker manual.

      “Don’t worry!” said my friends in consolation. “All the instruction you need is in the onscreen help menu.” But it wasn’t, that’s the sad truth. I asked my computer for help repeatedly. I begged my computer for help. I literally cried for help. And what did I get? Electronic double-talk gobblygook, entirely incomprehensible to a non-computer person like me. The help menu, I’m sure, is extremely helpful to people who already know all the terminology and most of the answers. But I didn’t. I was lost at sea without a paddle, clueless in computerland.

      What I longed for was a book, a nice thick manual to take even a slow, paper-oriented individual like me into the modern age. I soon found there were two instruction manuals to choose from, one from Apple: “Office 2001 for Mac: The Complete Reference”, by Gene Steinberg, ISBN: 0-07213168-3, and the volume whose ISBN number is at the top of this column that I finally chose, “Office 2001 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual,” which was written by two non-Apple computer whizzes, Nan Barber and David Reynolds. It was the subtitle on the cover that made me nearly delirious with relief: “The book that should have been in the box.” Yes! I cried. “David and Nan, I’m with you!”

      In a wonderfully clear way, with many graphics, David and Nan manage to take even a beginner like me along the Mac Office 2001 trail: 277 pages on MS Word for Mac alone, with further thick sections for the remaining software in the Office “suite” -- Entourage, Excel, and PowerPoint. I can’t tell you how relieved I am just to be able to navigate my humble novel-in-progress, that I can get my cursed cursor to the front of the document by hitting Apple Key plus Home, and get to the end by hitting Apple Key plus End. Simple things like this make life possible. And there is a lot more, of course – the entire range of what Office 2001 for Mac can do. One hardly has a hint of such possibilities in the onscreen help menu.

      And so you see me, a reasonably happy modern man. I’m not saying I wouldn’t prefer to be whisked backward in time to the 19th century, with a nice quill and ink to write my fiction. But I am adjusting, more or less.