Category Archives: Computers and Software

Lyonizing Word: Assigning Macro Shortcut Keys

By americaneditor | Published: August 31, 2015

Learning how to assign keyboard combinations to macros may seem like a small thing, but small things add up to greater editing efficiency, and that means more money in your pocket and less time at work, both of which are big things.

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Lyonizing Word: The Easy Way, Not So Easy

By americaneditor | Published: June 29, 2015

by Jack Lyon After publishing my last article, Lyonizing Word: We Can Do This the Easy Way, or . . ., Rich Adin, An American Editor, wrote: As written, your wildcard find and replace reduces four names to three if “et al:” is the ending characteristic. How do you write it so that it can handle any […]

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Lyonizing Word: We Can Do This the Easy Way, or . . .

By americaneditor | Published: May 27, 2015

We Can Do This the Easy Way, or We Can Do This the Hard Way by Jack Lyon American Editor Rich Adin called me recently with a puzzle. He was editing a list of citations that looked like this: Lyon J, Adin R, Poole L, Brenner E, et al: blah blah blah. But his client […]

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Lyonizing Word: Shifting Styles

By americaneditor | Published: April 27, 2015

The whole issue with all of these Word style problems is one of control. How much “help” do you want Microsoft Word to give you? If you’re editing, your answer may be “none,” because editors need to have complete control over what’s happening, and they can’t have Word introducing changes they may not even be aware of. When I’m editing, I disable all of these features. If you’ve been suffering from the madness of shifting styles, maybe you’ll want to do the same.

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The Business of Editing: Wildcarding for Dollars

By americaneditor | Published: February 18, 2015

I can tell you from the project I am working on now that wildcarding has saved me hours of toiling. I have already had several chapters with 400 or more references that were not in the correct format. Wildcarding let me clean up author names, as here, and let me change cites from 1988;52(11):343-45 to 52:343, 1988 in minutes.

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Lyonizing Word: The Right Tool for the Job

By americaneditor | Published: January 28, 2015

Using the right tool can make editing faster, more accurate, and more profitable.

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Lyonizing Word: Finding and Replacing Upper- and Lowercase

By americaneditor | Published: December 29, 2014

Finding and Replacing Upper- and Lowercase by Jack Lyon Rich Adin, the proprietor of this blog, recently sent me an interesting question. He wrote: I need a wildcard find and replace, assuming it can be done by wildcards, that searches for the following Abrams: alpha booby: alarm and replaces it with Abrams: Alpha booby: Alarm […]

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Lyonizing Word: Let’s Go Spelunking

By americaneditor | Published: August 18, 2014

 Let’s Go Spelunking by Jack Lyon Spelunking is the recreational pastime of exploring caves. It’s a dark and dangerous hobby, an extreme sport for those who are confident in their ability to climb, navigate, and even swim (there’s usually water down there). I try to avoid such hazards, but I’m not afraid to explore some […]

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Lyonizing Word: Formatting with Macros

By americaneditor | Published: June 9, 2014

Most users of Microsoft Word format text by selecting a paragraph and then applying a font. More advanced users apply a style. Why? Because then if they need to change the formatting of, say, level-2 headings, they can simply modify the style rather than tediously selecting each heading and applying a different font. But there is a way to handle formatting that is even more powerful.

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Lyonizing Word: Removing Spaces at the End of Table Cells

By americaneditor | Published: May 5, 2014

Authors do funny things. Sometimes these things are inadvertent; sometimes they’re the result of trying to “prettify” documents for publication. In either case, editors have to clean up what the authors have done.

One such problem is spaces at the ends of table cells. A table cell should end with the text it contains. If there are spaces after that text, they can cause alignment (and other) problems if they’re allowed to persist into typesetting.
This macro solves that problem.

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