Product Reviews

microsoft Office 2000 Step-by-Step Interactive is the latest training aid to spring forth from Microsoft Press, adding to the vast range of such products on sale today, not only from Microsoft but also from a wide variety of other publishers. As you might have guessed, this product covers Microsoft Office 2000, which is already not short of a training aid or two.

With a plethora of other products on the market, all training-aid producers know that they have to get it right, as a bad product will lower customer confidence and reduce the chances of them purchasing further training aids. Produce a good instructional tool and you've tapped into a rich vein of trust, because if your company's aids help someone with one product, they're much more likely to come back for more.

Microsoft Press started out quite small, but has been expanding rapidly. This can sometimes lead to loss of quality in the rush for quantity, so I was interested to see whether this latest offering had suffered from that effect.

To get an idea of the program's innate usability, I dived in head first, ignoring any manuals or installation instructions. I prefer to work like this, as it lets me get my hands dirty straight away, and if it isn't immediately obvious how the product works, you find yourself struggling very quickly. That would clearly be sub-optimal for a product designed to provide training.

As I discovered, installation for this product could be done in two different ways. I could opt for a network installation, serving the training materials via a browser to anyone who signed up for it, or I could simply put the whole shooting match on a workstation and work with it locally. The neat thing about the network installation is that, as the administrator, you can tailor the material presented to accommodate the requirements of each user who logs on. This would make it a good choice of product for an ISP, which could choose to serve some or all of it to remote clients, perhaps complementing its supply of Office 2000, helping users to quickly get up to speed. I found the product easy to set up in network mode, and had no difficulty creating tailored courses for my users from the available course materials. The workstation install was plain sailing. When prompted, I simply asked for everything to be placed on my hard disk, and within a few minutes I was absorbed in my first lesson.

Teaching with style

Lesson style is important, as are the voices that talk you through the lessons, and I was pleased to see that Microsoft opted to have both a man and a woman doing the talking. This instantly stops the spoken content from veering towards the monotonous, and ensures that you'll probably stay awake for most, if not all, of a session. As I can remember falling asleep to some voices on training aids, this is no small matter. Length of sessions and how much of a part you play in them also affects your chances of being bored, so I was a disappointed to see that while the length of each session appeared in the status bar when the lesson began, it failed to count down through the session, so I never had any idea how much longer I had to go. That's fine if you're able to work through a session from start to finish in one hit, but more problematic if you get distracted and have to leave the training and come back to it later on.

One thing I found interesting about the layout of the product was the way that, while the first heading of Getting Started was clearly aimed at novice users, the lesson on charts in Excel actually fell after the lesson on how to publish Excel charts to the Web in the list hierarchy. This was because basic charts came under the group headed 'Analysing Information', and that appeared as the top-level topic after 'Synthesizing and Managing Information', which is where the publishing of charts to the Web is covered.

All the headings are displayed in a clear format, utilising the ubiquitous tree format that everyone is used to by now. Expand one heading and the subheadings immediately spring into view; expand them, and their headings

When you have a product of this nature, there are basically two approaches you can take to presenting your data. You can either opt to have a top-level heading of Microsoft PowerPoint, for example, and put all the PowerPoint material in there, with another for Microsoft Access and so on, or you can provide headings based on what you think people intend to do with the suite, which is the approach that Microsoft has taken.

If data analysis were your intended area of training, therefore, a heading of 'Analyzing Information' would act as something of a magnet and you wouldn't be too surprised to find Excel charts listed among the contents.

However, it's not always so easy to put yourself in the mind of the person who designed the headings, so a good search facility is an absolute must when you want to find something in a hurry. I used the search facility in this respect and it managed with aplomb, but I also used it to help me find out what level of user the content was pitched at. I suspected, for example, that searching on PivotTables would produce results, whereas a similar search for Solver might not prove nearly as fruitful - I was right. For those of you familiar with the curriculae for the MOUS (Microsoft Office User Specialist) exams, I would say that this product falls somewhere between the standard and expert levels, not quite walking the middle ground between them. That isn't as big an issue as it might seem, as you're provided with templates that you can use to add content to existing courses, so if you wanted to add a section on Solver in Excel, then you could.

Ease of use

In terms of usability, I found the product to be clear and a pleasure to work with. The controls were well laid out and easy to use. Instructions were given clearly and you were allowed plenty of time to carry them out. Actually, that's also a criticism, as you're allowed to carry out a task for an indefinite amount of time. Once you're told to do something, if you don't do it, nothing happens. You don't get prompted to do it again, you don't get an automatic demonstration of what you should have done - it just sits there and stares at you until you actually do something. You're also in no danger of losing your way or forgetting the instruction, because it appears written out below the area you're working in, but I'd have found it handy if the product showed me the steps on occasion. Certainly, this does mean that if you get interrupted by the phone during an exercise, you can stop what you're doing and pick up the phone rather than having to frantically search for the volume control or the pause button.

Each section has a pre-assessment area where you can test yourself to see if the next section is going to teach you anything at all. There's also a quiz, which is designed to be taken after completing a section, so you can get instant feedback on how well you absorbed the information presented to you. I was also pleased to see a Glossary button beside each task that was context-sensitive to the data you were working with. Touches like that are always welcome, as was the fact that when I restarted the software after a shutdown, it remembered where I'd been and opened the windows as I'd left them.

One of the things I particularly liked about this product is that it's totally standalone. You don't need to have Office 2000 installed on your system in order to use it, as the whole working environment is reproduced for you within the training aid. This means you can carry out tasks knowing there's no way that you can be affecting live data or having the slightest chance of altering the original configuration of your Office products.

Since you don't even need to own Office 2000 to use this product, you could also use this as one way of assessing the suite before purchase, as you'll get a reasonable overview of its low- to mid-range capabilities.

I found Microsoft Office 2000 Step-by-Step Interactive fast to use both locally and over the network. The ability to tailor content to users is sure to find favour within companies both large and small. Also to its credit is the fact that it will cater for the individual, even if you just install the entire package on to one system. As a result of this flexibility I can see this product appealing right across the board to a wide variety of users, which I'm sure is exactly what Microsoft's initial intentions were.