Microsoft Excel 2013 books published

Microsoft Excel 2013 Core Parts 1 and 2

Back in January, I was approached by an online publisher to write some books for them on Excel 2013, PowerPoint 2013 and Outlook 2013.  I was given a deadline of the beginning of June and the manuscripts were submitted on May 29th! Phew!

It is quite a process to write a book. I had three!! All this alongside delivering training, talking to new clients, analysing learning needs and generally getting on with life.

I had to decide what the books would be about and what style to write them in. I decided to look at the Microsoft Office Specialist exam objectives and take it from there.

The Excel 2013 and PowerPoint 2013 books are written to match the objectives of the Microsoft Office Specialist exams – the Outlook 2013 book contains my favourite things and the best time saving tips.

So began the writing task. Not just writing you understand, also taking screen shots to illustrate how the screen should look when you follow the instructions. The instructions also need to make sense.

Then there is formatting.

A book has

• chapters
• headings
• a table of contents
• an index
• pictures have captions

All of these could be time consuming to add if not for the automatic features in Microsoft Word. By using Heading Styles it is possible to generate an automatic table of contents, Word has a captioning tool which makes adding the captions simple and indexing although fiddly does not take up too much time once you have decided on the way you wish to use capitalisation and which things you are going to index.

The Excel 2013 Core book covers so much information that we decided to split it into two. Both of the Excel 2013 books have now been published on-line. The PowerPoint and Outlook books will follow in the next couple of days.

You can get the books on-line from www.bookboon.com and here are links to each of the Excel books.

Excel 2013 Core Part 1

Excel 2013 Core Part 2

The books can be purchased direct from bookboon or you can subscribe on a monthly basis and get access to the complete library of books.

We use these books in our training – to discus any training needs you or your organisation has, give us a call 020 8203 1774. We would love to speak with you.