I doubt many people saw it coming, but it’s happened; computers have shed their stodgy images and become the sexy party accessories of the 1990s. People with better bodies than you have taken to swapping URLs in dance clubs. What’s now is what’s digital, don’t you know. Against this red-blooded backdrop, office suites (those bundled collections of word processors, spreadsheets, and the like) look positively anemic. Sure, they’re useful – even essential – tools. They’re just not very much fun.

Even the mighty Microsoft, with all the promotional dollars in the world at its disposal, is having a tough time with this new reality. Its new suite, Office 97, is stable and reliable, and it’s considerably easier to use than previous versions. But it’s not www.sexdrugsrock&roll.com.

Still, every time Bill Gates coughs, a dozen new “instructional” books appear, all bursting with enthusiasm over The Most Innovative, Exciting Software Development Of The Year. The release of Office 97 is no exception; many tutorials are absolutely breathless with excitement. As for people who could actually use some help with their spell-checkers…well, there’s a lot of chaff to dig through.

More than anything, the Office 97 package is clever marketing; it’s hyped as a tightly knit powerkit – one that can easily, seamlessly move information from a spreadsheet to a word-processor document to a database to a web page to your address book and so on. The truth, however, is that Office 97 is a collection of programs that do different things. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, and Access may have all been redesigned to look like each other, but they’re still discrete programs, and few people will find themselves using all of them. Most users, I suspect, will spend the bulk of their time pecking out letters and memos with Word. Sadly, many of the new Office 97 instructional books fail to recognize this, and focus entirely too much attention on the “integrated,” Web-savvy features of the suite.

Teach Yourself Office 97 in 24 Hours is one of the worst offenders. It’s organized as a series of lessons, each of which is supposed to take slightly less than an hour. At the end of it all, users will have the entire suite mastered. Or that’s the theory.

In truth, the book spends its first four lessons plugging the really great work those hardworking kids at Microsoft have done. So we read about Office 97’s “neatest features,” about the clean, elegant interface, about the nifty cartoon characters who animate the suite’s help system, and about the way Office 97 will bring your office onto the Internet.

Five hours into the guide, we get our first introduction to Word. Unfortunately, it’s not much of an introduction. Instead, we’re told that, “just a few years ago, complete word-processing books dedicated themselves to teaching typing, correcting, inserting, erasing, and over-typing skills. Today, tutorials assume you already have these basic skills.”

Pardon me for asking an obvious question, but who are tutorial books for? Office 97 comes with a manual, after all. The folks buying supplementary guides are not seasoned users, they’re people who need extra help. An introductory guidebook that expects its readers to already know the basics has a horribly unclear grip on its own reason for being.

To be fair, the book’s other sections – those covering the other four Office 97 programs – are a bit more thorough. But they share the same misguided focus on bells and whistles, and don’t spend nearly enough time on effective, helpful instruction.

Office 97 for Busy People begins with great promise. It bills itself as “The Book to Use When There’s No Time to Lose,” and author Stephen L. Nelson tells us early on that his book won’t fall into the trap that other tutorials have. It won’t parrot the Microsoft line, and it won’t get caught up discussing the suite’s bells and whistles. To Nelson’s credit, he keeps his word. But the book is a mess.

Immediately after promising that Office 97 for Busy People will concentrate on delivering the practical help that ordinary users need, it takes a bizarre left turn. Apparently, the best way to start learning the suite is by fiddling with monitor resolution in the Windows control panel. This book isn’t a complete write-off; it’s full of well-illustrated examples, and the writing is clear. But it can’t resist dipping into fun-for-geeks-but-confusing-for-novices territory. In a tutorial, that’s a big no-no.

Microsoft Office 97 for Windows for Dummies does a better job, but still has problems. Like others in the Dummies line of computer books, this one is full of cartoons and frequently strays into patronizing, cutesy-poo asides. Ironically, the book’s first chapter covers the animated “Office Assistant” help-system characters in detail, and provides detailed instructions for getting rid of them. Just in case users feel insulted or talked-down-to, you see.

The following chapters explain how to launch the various Office 97 programs, how to work with and save documents, how to move data from one program to another, and how just plain swell the whole package is. The individual explanations are clear enough, but this book, like Teach Yourself in 24 Hours, takes several chapters before getting around to the nuts and bolts of actually using the programs. When it finally does, it rattles off instructions uncomfortably quickly. So instead of getting the patient coaching they need, readers are left digging through dense charts, lists, and tables to find information.

Books in the Complete Idiot’s series often seem like note-for-note knockoffs of Dummies volumes – right down to the garish covers and juvenile humour. But The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Microsoft Office 97 Professional is, for the most part, a refreshing departure from the norm.

It opens by acknowledging that most people won’t use all five programs regularly, and may not ever use some of them. That out of the way, it proceeds through the suite at a sane, orderly pace. First, how to use the help system. Next, how to turn off the cartoons. Then, one program at a time, what users need to know to actually begin working. At the end of it all, the book outlines the business of integrating the five applications with clear, easy-to-follow instructions. And, the obnoxious title aside, the book is never insulting. This one is a rare winner.

Learn! Microsoft Office 97 Getting Started is a slickly produced video designed to be quicker and more effective than book-based tutorials. At just over 90 minutes long, it’s certainly quicker, but I’m not convinced this is a good way to learn to use a program.

The video is hosted by Tom Jaffee and Keith White, two former Microsoft trainers who call themselves “The Software Guys.” Neither one is very comfortable on camera, and much of the tape has a first-time-reading-off-the-teleprompter feel. Fortunately, Jaffee and White have most of their rough edges smoothed out by the presence of Penny Legate, a more professional host.

TV esthetics aside, the video suffers from the limitations of the medium. Individual demonstrations of Office 97’s features are unfailingly clear, but there are a lot of them, and they fly by very quickly. This makes the tape less than ideal as either a tutorial or a reference. The Software Guys have tried hard here. I’m just not sure what they’re attempting is possible.

As Microsoft’s software dominance grows, knowing Office 97 may well become as important as knowing how to use a telephone. Not a happy thought, but those who’ve resigned themselves to the fact could do worse than The Complete Idiot’s Guide.