As I read Teach yourself Web Publishing with Microsoft Office 97 in a week, I began to notice that the primary applications in the Office 97 suite, which are Access, Excel, Word and PowerPoint, are spoken of very highly. In fact, the entire book seemed rather like a very long advertisement. Certainly it is not the author’s responsibility to report problems with a given software package if that is not the intent of the book. However, I could not find a mention of any limitations of the Office suite. The book is well written, and follows what is now a formula for software how‐tos. There is some background information on the internet, and specially for readers new to the World Wide Web, there are step‐by‐step instructions for completing the exercises. There is a series of discussions and exercises, using examples available on the CD included with the book.
The book covers the most important types of documents one may want to publish on an intranet, or to make available to the public. This includes using Excel to add financial information, using Access to make database information available, creating presentations with PowerPoint and of course Word for creating Web pages. You might keep in mind, however, that anyone accessing a document created with an Office 97 application which does not translate into HTML will need that application to use the document.
The book is broken up into seven two‐chapter “days”. Each day centers around a central
theme. Note that this book does not give in‐depth instruction on the various Office 97 elements. There are numerous books on the market for that. Teach yourself assumes a fair amount of knowledge in the applications, although just a basic knowledge is really necessary to make use of it.
Day one describes some background information on the Internet and some of its interesting aspects. Chapter one gives basic Internet information. First it describes how the WWW is set up. It also talks about other Internet utilities, such as email, ftp, newsgroups and chatrooms. There is also some discussion of how to get access to the Internet from home. There is a good list of questions that an Internet novice might not know to ask himself before signing up with an Internet Service Provider. The author then defines and discusses Intranets. A section called Designing and Managing an Internet may not be necessary to those who are simply creating the documents to be published. However, it provides some information on how decisions might be made as to where certain documents should be stored.
Chapter two covers the basic Web technology available in all the Office 97 applications. There is a detailed discussion of the Web toolbar. In the overview, the author touches on hyperlinking and translating to HTML, Hypertext Markup Language, the basic language of the Web, and its importance to the Web. There is also a discussion of Web browsers, and not surprisingly, Larson recommends Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. There are installation instructions for the Explorer, and an overview of the major parts.
Day two is devoted to building Web pages. Word 97 can be used as a text editor for writing HTML source. However, most people will use Word as a wysiwyg editor. There are some good tips for creating interesting Web pages using layout and graphics. I particularly appreciated the lists of what does and does not translate well from Word to HTML.
Day three concentrates on adding financial information to the Internet and an intranet using Excel 97. Day four concentrates on using PowerPoint to create presentations and putting them on the Internet. Larson discusses which file formats to use in an intranet or internet situation, since browsers themselves cannot read PowerPoint standard file formats. And of course, a presentation would not be interesting without some neat graphics and sound.
Day five discusses publishing database information. Using a database to publish information can be extremely useful. It can be used to publish schedules, financial information ‐ anything that can be stored in a database. And since database information can change, you need not necessarily update your Web page associated with some given data ‐ the data will be updated as long as the database is updated.
Days six and seven cover more advanced topics, and some software not available in Office 97, such as FrontPage.
Given the importance of the Internet to businesses and education today, and Microsoft’s dominance in PC software, I believe teach yourself could be an important addition to your internet library. The examples included on the CD are useful in getting someone with little or no Internet publishing experience started.
