If you’re the type of person who likes to see something in order to really understand it, rather than reading text describing a process, the Teach Yourself Visually books are designed for you. One of the latest, on Office 2003, tries to get you up to speed with the software with loads of pictures and graphics.

The tagline of the Teach Yourself Visually books is tailor-made for the impatient or those with a short attention span: “read less — learn more”. Following this approach, the entire book is full of colour pictures, including screenshots with the relevant sections highlighted and dialogue boxes shown.

After a basic Getting started chapter, the book moves on to sections devoted to the individual applications within Office like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Publisher, and Outlook. There’s also a section on Office and the Internet — with how-tos on topics like creating hyperlinks and saving files as Web pages.

While some details are given on new tools in Office 2003, if you’re already your office’s productivity whiz you may find the content a little too basic. The downside of loads of pictures, of course, is that you can only cover a topic quite briefly. Most tasks, for instance, are covered over one or two pages.

If, on the other hand, Office 2003 is your first experience with the Microsoft application, a quick introduction like this one could be the ticket for understanding its functions in the minimum amount of time.