Introduction

Welcome to the most popular office productivity software in the world. If you’re already familiar with Microsoft Office 2007 or Microsoft Office 2010, you’ll find that the new Microsoft Office 2013 is familiar enough to use right away with minimal training, but comes jam-packed with additional features to make Office even more useful than ever before. If you’ve been using a much older version of Office (such as Office 2003 or earlier), you’ll find Office 2013 to be a radical leap forward in both features and its new user interface.

Like most software, the real challenge is figuring out where to find the commands you need to do something useful. While this book won’t turn you into a Microsoft Office 2013 expert overnight, it will give you just enough information so you can feel confident using the new Office 2013 and get something done quickly and easily without tearing your hair out and losing your mind in the process.

In this book, you find out how to master the “Ribbon” user interface along with discovering the dozens of new features that Microsoft added to your favorite program in Office 2013. More importantly, you find a host of shortcuts and tips to help you work faster and more efficiently than ever before. Whether you rely on Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Access, or Outlook, you’re sure to glean something new from this book to help you master Office 2013 on your own computer.

Who Should Buy This Book

This book is targeted toward three distinct groups. First, there are the people already familiar with Microsoft Office 2007 or Office 2010 who want to catch up with the new features of Office 2013. For these people, this book can serve as a handy reference for finding out how to use the latest features.

Second, there are people upgrading from an older version of Microsoft Office, such as Office 2003 or Office XP. For these people, this book can serve as a gentle guide to help you make a less-painful transition from traditional pull-down menus to the new “Ribbon” user interface.

Finally, there may be people who may have rarely (if ever) used any version of Microsoft Office at all. For those people, this book can serve as a guide through word processing (Microsoft Word), number calculations (Microsoft Excel), presentations (Microsoft PowerPoint), database management (Microsoft Access), and managing your personal resources such as time, appointments, and e-mail (Microsoft Outlook).

No matter how much (or how little) you may know about Microsoft Office, this book can show you how to use the most common and most useful features of Office 2013 so you can start being productive right away.

How This Book Is Organized

To help you find what you need, this book is organized into parts where each part covers a different program in Office 2010.

Part I: Getting Started with Microsoft Office 2013

To use Microsoft Office 2013, you need to know how to find the commands you need. This part of the book focuses on showing you how to use the Ribbon user interface that appears in all Office 2013 programs. By the time you finish this part of the book, you’ll feel comfortable using any program in Office 2013.

Part II: Working with Word

Word processing is the most popular use for Office 2013, so this part of the book explains the basics of using Word. Not only will you find out how to create and save different types of documents, but you’ll also master different ways to alter text, such as using color, changing fonts, adding headers and footers, checking spelling and grammar, and printing your written masterpiece so it looks perfect.

Part III: Playing the Numbers with Excel

If you need to manipulate numbers, you need Microsoft Excel. This part of the book explains the three basic parts of any spreadsheet, how to format data, how to create formulas, and how to create different types of charts to help you visualize what your spreadsheet numbers really mean. Not only will you discover how to calculate and “crunch” numbers, but you’ll also find how to analyze the results and turn them into eye-catching charts to help you understand trends that may be buried within your data. If you want to find out how to use Microsoft Excel to create, format, and display spreadsheets, this is the part of the book for you.

Part IV: Making Presentations with PowerPoint

Throw away your overhead transparencies and clumsy whiteboard and pads of paper. If you need to give a presentation to a large group, you need to know how to create colorful and visually interesting presentations with PowerPoint instead. With PowerPoint, you can organize a presentation into slides that can display text, pictures, animation, and even video. By mastering PowerPoint, you can create presentations that grab an audience’s attention and emphasize the points you want to make while holding their interest at the same time.

Part V: Getting Organized with Outlook

Almost nobody feels that they have enough time to stay organized, so this part of the book explains why and how to use Microsoft Outlook. With Outlook, you can read, sort, and write e-mail, keep track of appointments, store names and addresses of your most important contacts, and even organize your daily to-do tasks. By using Outlook to manage your busy schedule, you can turn your computer into a personal assistant to make you more productive than ever before.

Part VI: Storing Stuff in Access

If you need to store large amounts of information, such as tracking inventories, organizing customer orders, or storing names and addresses of prospective customers, you may need to use a database program like Microsoft Access. In this part of the book, you see how to use Access to store, retrieve, sort, and print your data in different ways. With Access able to slice and dice your information, you can better analyze your data to understand how your business really works.

Part VII: The Part of Tens

Almost every program offers multiple ways of accomplishing the same task, and Office 2013 is no exception. After you get familiar with using Office, take a peek in this part of the book to read about different types of shortcuts you can use to work with Office even faster than before. By the time you get to this part of the book, you’ll be much more comfortable using Office 2013 so you can feel comfortable exploring and experimenting with different features on your own.

How to Use This Book

Although you can just flip through this book to find the features you need, browse through Part I for a quick refresher (or introduction) to the Office 2013 user interface Ribbon. After you understand the basics of using this new Ribbon user interface, you’ll be able to master any Office 2013 program in no time.

Conventions

To get the most from this book, you need to understand the following conventions:

The mouse pointer usually appears as an arrow and serves multiple purposes. First, you use the mouse pointer to select data (text, numbers, e-mail messages, and so on) to change. Second, you use the mouse pointer to tell Office 2013 which commands you want to use to change the data you selected. Finally, the appearance of the mouse pointer can reveal the options available to you at that moment.

Clicking means moving the mouse pointer over something on the screen (such as a menu command or a button), pressing the left mouse button once, and then letting go. Clicking tells the computer, “See what I’m pointing at? That’s what I want to choose right now.”

Double-clicking means pointing at something with the mouse pointer and clicking the left mouse button twice in rapid succession.

Dragging means holding down the left mouse button while moving the mouse. Dragging typically moves something from one onscreen location to another, such as moving a word from the top of a paragraph to the bottom.

Right-clicking means moving the mouse pointer over something and clicking the right mouse button once. Right-clicking typically displays a shortcut menu of additional options.

In addition to understanding these terms to describe different mouse actions, you also need to understand different keystroke conventions too. When you see an instruction that reads Ctrl+P, that means to hold down the Ctrl key, press the P key, and then let go of both the Ctrl and P key at the same time.

Finally, most computer mice offer a scroll wheel that lets you roll it up or down, or press on it. This scroll wheel works to scroll windows up or down, whether you’re using Office 2013 or nearly any other type of program as well. In Office 2013, the scroll wheel doesn’t serve any unique purpose, but it can be a handy tool for rapidly scrolling through windows in any Office 2013 program.

Icons Used in This Book

Icons highlight important or useful information.

This icon highlights information that can save you time or make it easier for you to do something.

This icon emphasizes information that can be helpful, although not crucial, when using Office 2013.

Watch out! This icon highlights something that can hurt or wipe out important data. Read this information before making a mistake that you may not be able to recover from again.

This icon highlights interesting technical information that you can safely ignore but may answer some questions about why Office 2013 works a certain way.

Getting Started

The best way to master anything is to jump right in and start fiddling with different commands just to see what they do and how they work. In case you’re afraid of breaking your computer or wiping out important data, play around with Office 2013 on a “dummy” document filled with useless information you can afford to lose (like your boss’s income tax returns — kidding!).

Here’s your first tip. Any time you do something in Office 2013, you can undo or take back your last command by pressing Ctrl+Z. (Just hold down the Ctrl key, press the Z key, and release both keys at the same time.) There, now that you know about the powerful Undo command, you should have a surging sense of invulnerability when using Office 2013, knowing that at any time you make a mistake, you can turn back time by pressing Ctrl+Z to undo your last command.

If you get nothing else from this book, always remember that the Ctrl+Z command can save you from yourself. See? Mastering Office 2013 is going to be easier than you think.