Category Archives: Editing Tools

Lyonizing Word: But Wait—There’s More!

By americaneditor | Published: September 30, 2015

Microsoft Word’s find and replace features can do an awful lot — much more than you might think. Do you know about the options? “Ignore punctuation characters” and “Ignore white-space characters,” for example, can be very useful in editing. Being able to find and replace formatting is essential, especially when using styles. And using Word’s built-in codes lets you search for all kinds of things (graphics, page breaks, dashes, and so on) that would otherwise require more advanced techniques (like wildcards and numeric codes). In other words, Microsoft Word’s basic find and replace features aren’t so basic — at least not in what they can do!

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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: Formatting with Macros

By americaneditor | Published: November 12, 2014

Formatting with Macros by Jack Lyon Most users of Microsoft Word format text by selecting a paragraph and then applying a font. More advanced users apply a style. Here’s why: Styles are easier to use than direct formatting. Once you have the style set up (with, say, 12-point Arial bold, condensed by 1 point, left […]

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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: The Next Character Macro

By americaneditor | Published: March 3, 2014

Macros and mastering Microsoft Word are keys to success in the business of editing. One can be a great editor and not master either, but it is more difficult, if not near-impossible, to have a successful editing business if you aren’t master of the tools you use.

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