As editors, we often help clients to make their long documents as easy to read as possible. This doesn’t just mean improving structure, flow and grammar. It can also involve helping the reader to navigate the document; for example, with headings, bullets and section numbering. One of the tools we need to master here is page numbering. Happily, modern word …
Making the most of comments in MS Word
Most editors make extensive use of comments in MS Word. Sure, the conversations are a bit one-sided, but adding comments in Word can feel like you’re communicating directly with your client. If you need to clarify why you’ve changed some text, or provide options for revising a particular section, you can tell your client there, on the page, and they …
Why should I use EndNote in Word?
For academic and technical editors, EndNote is like pineapple on pizza – you either love it or hate it. I used to fall into the hating category; if a project arrived with references in EndNote or some other reference management program, I promptly contacted the author asking for a plain text version that I could edit. Now, I’m delighted when …
Distracted by formatting markup? How to stop tracking changes in Word
As an editor, you probably work with track changes turned on in Word – the tracking is helpful for you and your clients. But if you’re making a lot of changes, you’ll have noticed that the document gets quite crowded. You may not need to track every change Your clients might be happy for you not to track things such …
Oops, I forgot to track changes – how to compare documents in Word
It is easy to get part way through a project and suddenly realise that you forgot to turn on Track Changes. Or perhaps you turned off tracking partway through for some reason and forgot to turn it back on. In such situations, Word’s Compare function is your friend. It’s a neat way to create a new document that includes all …
Customise the quick access toolbar
Are you tired of having to click several times to use a feature in MS Word? Or perhaps you can’t find things when you need them. The key to speeding up your editing is to customise the quick access toolbar (QAT). Few people know about this useful feature, but I find it a real time-saver when I’m editing a document. …
Three easy ways to make Word shortcuts work for you
When you’re editing in Word, keyboard shortcuts are a fabulous way to speed up your work and avoid an overuse injury. It’s easy to find Word shortcuts – here are some helpful lists from Microsoft and fellow editor Louise Harnby. But shortcuts are only useful if you can easily remember them. Here are three tips to help you to do …
Three reasons why editors need PerfectIt
Among the many tools available for editors, PerfectIt is one of the best. Despite using PerfectIt for more than 10 years, I still find myself thinking ‘that’s fantastic’ when I run it on a long document. Here are three reasons why I love PerfectIt. 1 – PerfectIt saves you time PerfectIt, an add-in to MS Word, was initially designed to …
A text expander vs autocorrect
One tool that I absolutely could not do without is a text expander – a program that saves time by completing frequently used phrases or snippets of text. In the past, I used the Autocorrect function in MS Word to do this. For example, I had set up Word so that when I typed ‘hivx’, the words ‘human immunodeficiency virus’ …
Saving time with MS Word add-ins
How Microsoft Word add-ins can speed up your editing When they were first brought out, ‘labour-saving devices’ such as washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners and dishwashers were sold as great time-savers. Sadly, the promised additional leisure time has simply been absorbed into yet more work. It seems to be the same with editing. We now have a host of different …