Manual to support students in using the Microsoft Office XP operating system and the Microsoft Office 2003 software suite.
In many developing countries IS textbooks tend to be expensive despite the best and, I believe, sincere efforts of educational publishers to keep their developing country rates as low as humanly possible. This book (except for the Access section) has been released under the Creative Commons license, i.e. it is freely available for (educational) use to anyone who wants it.
Bandwidth in South Africa is quite expensive so please download only the chapters (modules) in which you are genuinely interested. Non-African users are kindly requested to use one of the mirror sites e.g. Richard Watson's http://globaltext.org/books/website/books-OfficeXP.html (which will be much faster plus this site also has some other exciting stuff!)
These books are intended to be "QuickStarts" i.e. they do not take the long leisurely "idiot" approach but rather condense the essential knowledge in a compact volume. In addition, there is quite a bit of "South African" customization (which was one of the reasons for writing it in the first place).
The modules on Windows, Word and Powerpoint are rather dense - I spent 80% of my time on writing the Excel sections which is what we teach here at first-year level. The "QuickStart to Excel" introduces the basics in a fairly relaxed manner; the "Using Excel" is a more advanced and faster-paced exploration of Excel functionality in the context of Commerce Students/Business Users.
