Say “Hello!” to my latest book, a massive tome titled Word 2016 For Professionals For Dummies. It’s the first of my For Dummies titles to use the new trade dress, which I’m not fond of, but I assume that I’ll get used to.
Next week I’ll show how For Dummies books have changed their looks over the years. Still, we don’t judge a book by its cover, right?
I’ve been hankering to write a top-level Word book for a long time. Too long, in fact. Every so often, I’ve asked my publisher about doing a higher-level Word book. They kept saying “No,” and otherwise lacked a reason to go into this territory.
Over the past few years, however, they noticed that their high-end Excel book was doing well. (And that’s unusual, given how few people read books these days.) Anyway, they decided to take a stab at my advanced word processing book idea. The problem was what to call it?
The title Advanced Word For Dummies makes no sense. And, naturally, I thought up some crude titles that the publisher wouldn’t find amusing. Anyway, eventually they settled on the notion of Word for Professionals, which I like.
In this new title (my first book that wasn’t an update/new edition in about 7 years) I cover a lot of topics readers have asked about for the longest time.
Yes, the book covers macros. I get asked that question so frequently I almost self-published a Word Macros book.
The next book also covers advanced layout options, creating long documents such as novels, working with Word’s drawing tools, and other topics that my Word For Dummies titles just don’t have the space to cover.
In fact, on this title I received one of the highest compliments from my copy editor. She said that this was one of her favorite books to edit because she learned so much. She said that she would actually buy the book if she wasn’t editing it, which is something I really appreciate.
The book is hefty, coming in at over 600 pages. That’s yet another gift from my publisher and normally they stew that my books are too long. So I welcomed the chance to write and write about topics I’ve been eager to cover for years. In fact, I wrote this book very quickly, which is unusual for its size. I suppose it’s a book that’s waited a long time to come out.
