I have been using Microsoft Office for over 20 years, and have been an IT trainer for 25 years.  My immediate comment, when I first laid eyes on the new Microsoft Office ribbons, was "Yikes!  I'm going to have to completely change my training approach!"  This book came about as a result of that process of totally reworking my training resources.

This is the book I wished somebody had already written - because I was in in need of it!  For those who are not Office users, an analogy is probably the best way to give you an appreciation of the 'challenge' that the totally-new-look ribbon interface presents to an experienced user:

It is as it would be if you were an artist or a carpenter, and someone came into your studio/shed and totally rearranged it, and put things in cupboards where they were not readily visible.  Having done so, they went walkabout without leaving any 'map' or 'guidelines' as to where things now are.

You know very well What you can do with a palette knife or hammer, and you know How to do it - you are now faced with the problem, however, that you have to go hunting randomly for the tools you used to be able to locate easily.

My working time was being taken up 'looking for familiar commands', and my hair was becoming progressively greyer, and my normally-low blood pressure was approaching 'normal'!  Talking to my students, clients and colleagues, I discovered I was not alone.  There is a need for a book which simply addresses the core issue of "where things are now".

I researched the book market and discovered that other books and training resources on the market are 'all-encompassing' - i.e. they are designed to cater for 'novice-up' and, therefore, are large, unwieldy, contain numerous large screenshots, and large amounts of explanatory text - all of which an experienced user does not require.

So, this book was born.  I wanted to create a compact (A5), truly portable, user-friendly (coil-bound to lie flat and generally containing a full set of instructions within an open-page spread) book, which addresses the core issue in upgrading to Office 2010.  In short, I wanted to produce a book which could be kept always at hand and which would end up with many dog-ears and signs of wear - in other words, a book which would be used, rather than just filling a space on a bookshelf.