Remember how, decades ago, we imagined that labour-saving devices such as washing machines, driers, vacuum cleaners and dishwashers would mean we’d have lots of extra leisure time? Somehow, it didn’t work out that way. I think there’s a similar situation in editing, in that we now have lots of different tools to make editing more efficient, yet editing seems to …
Making the most of the QAT
Do you sometimes struggle to find things in MS Word? Perhaps a particular feature isn’t where you expect it to be, or you get frustrated at having to click several times to get to a feature. If so, you might find the quick access toolbar (QAT) helpful. Many people aren’t aware of this useful feature. Microsoft didn’t highlight the QAT …
A clearer view in MS Word
Here’s a tip about another useful feature of MS Word that you might not be aware of: hiding headers and footers. When editing a document, I like to have the headers and footers hidden (the video below explains how to do this). Working in this view has several advantages: it makes it easier to focus on the text you can …
Online training course goes live!
My first online training course – Introduction to PerfectIt – went live today. The training page of my website has details of this and some of the other courses I’m planning. It’s been a long journey (about 2.5 years), and I’d like to thanks the many people who had a hand in making this happen: Tash, who first suggested that …
Sharing the love of MS Word!
I’m that rare beast, an editor who loves working with MS Word. It wasn’t always like that. For many years, Word and I had a troubled relationship and the program caused me a lot of grief. Luckily, I shared an office with colleagues who were younger and smarter. They kindly stepped in whenever I lost parts of my document, forgot …
Where is Jane Fonda when you need her?
It all seemed so simple when I offered to run a webinar about webinars for my local society of editors. We set a date, I signed up to a platform (ClickMeeting), the society found the participants, and I planned the session and practised it numerous times. Accompanying me at each practice session was my alter ego, Jane Fonda. I would set Jane up as a …
Benefits of co-working
Over the past 2 years I have gained a lot from Six Degrees, the co-working space in nearby Coffs Harbour. It’s been a great way to network with other people working from home in Coffs and Bellingen. And through attending events and giving a couple of pitches about my businesses at Six Degrees I have found: a web designer, who created …
Bringing aquaculture into the office
I love new toys, and I like to buy things that are locally made and environmentally friendly. Happily, my latest purchase, a desktop aquaculture system from Aquaponicals, ticks all the boxes. It’s a fabulous little system, in which the water is pumped from the reservoir at the bottom up to the grow bed at the top, where I have planted mint, parsley, oregano and …
Discovering what Edifix can do
Edifix is an online system for formatting and retrieving references. For medical editing jobs, I’ve been using Edifix to find references, which I then put into Endnote. For example, one document contained 10 chapters written by different authors, only half of whom had used Endnote. Edifix made it relatively easy to obtain the references for the remaining chapters from PubMed, and export the …
Co-author of Effective writing: plain English at work!
Had a great time last week at the launch of Effective writing: plain English at work, at Paperchain bookstore in Canberra. As I said at the launch, the project involved a bit more work than I originally anticipated — many hours of editing, more than 1000 emails exchanged and three face-to-face meetings with the main author, Elizabeth Murphy — but …