[ogfire]

[I have in my iMac "Microsoft Office 2008" software. The Excel section is too basic and the "help" menu on a topic is confusing. Is there a publication that I can purchase that I can use as a reference source? Also, is Excel 2007 similar to 2008?

[bastion]

 ogfire, on 25 January 2012 - 04:04 PM, said:

[I have in my iMac "Microsoft Office 2008" software. The Excel section is too basic and the "help" menu on a topic is confusing. Is there a publication that I can purchase that I can use as a reference source? Also, is Excel 2007 similar to 2008?

Similar, but being that Excel 2007 is for Windows and 2008 is for the Mac, and the products tend to leapfrog each other for feature sets I wouldn't turn to an Excel 2007 book. There are lots of books on Excel, and things to recommend for and against any of them for any given reader. Check the O'Reilly Missing Manual series; they've been generally high quality.

[EGM]

These two versions of Excel, 2007 and 2008, are probably further apart than any pair of Windows-Mac Excel releases before or since. Microsoft introduced the ribbon to Excel 2007 but waited until Excel 2011 to introduce it on the Mac side, so the user interfaces are quite different even though most things work the same way once you get deeper into them. Also, Excel 2008 didn't have the VBA programming language, so a lot of applications didn't work. I don't know if that was at all an issue for you, but VBA is back in Excel 2011.

It's not a reference source, but for training that's easier to understand, I'd take a look at YouTube. A search for "Microsoft Excel 2008 Macintosh" (without the quotes) got about 1,200 hits. I didn't check them out, but in my experience with YouTube tutorials for other packages, many of them are quite good. If you want to zero in on a specific topic, like functions, just add that to your search string.