Jack Lyon

Writing Down the Chaos

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

You can't do much carpentry with your bare hands, and you can't do much thinking with your bare brain. —Bo Dahlbom

High school English class. Freshman year. The teacher explained how to:

Come up with a thesis statement.
Create an outline of arguments supporting the thesis statement.
Write a paper based on that outline.

That's actually a terrible way to write! It requires you to organize your thoughts before you know what those thoughts actually are. But there is a better way.

Brainstorm, Organize, Write

What are your thoughts about a particular subject? In the days before computers, you'd find out like this:

Get a package of index cards, something like these.
On each card, write an idea related to your thesis (the fancy word for whatever it is you want to write about). Do not try to do this in any kind of order; you're brainstorming here: good ideas, bad ideas, any ideas—they all go down on the cards. When your brain is empty, stop.
On a big desk or table, spread the cards out in front of you. Keep them messy.
Read the cards and stack those on a certain subject together until you have several stacks. Discard (pardon the pun) those that don't belong anywhere or that now seem irrelevant or stupid.
Put the cards in each stack in some kind of order. Importance? Chronology? You choose.
Put the stacks in some kind of order. Each stack represents a section of your paper.

After you've captured and organized your thoughts, write your paper, starting with the first card and ending with the last. Each stack gets a subheading. Each card gets a paragraph. When you're finished, edit your paper as needed.

Card-Based Writing Programs

But, again, that was in the days before computers. We now have much better ways of doing what I've just described, with new card-based writing programs popping up all the time. Here are some that I recommend for the kind of writing I've explained in this article:

Milanote. $9.99 a month (billed annually).

Milanote is the most expensive of the programs listed here, but it's also the slickest. Cards can be created and then placed on the screen in any order you like. After you have them all down, organize them into columns. Finally, export the whole thing as a Word document, a Markdown document, or plain text, ready for editing. Milanote is elegant, a pleasure to use.

Speare. $4.95 a month (billed annually).

Speare doesn't support free-form card placement; each paragraph is a card, and all cards must be arranged in a "board." After creating and organizing your cards, "compile" them into a document, copy the document, and paste into Word or another word processor.

SuperNotecard. $19 a year.

SuperNotecard includes various kinds of metadata you can use to organize your cards: headings, flags, ratings, categories, references, and much more. If you're writing a novel, SuperNotecard is probably the way to go, as you can create and link to cards for characters, settings, themes, and so on. At just $19 a year, it's ridiculously cheap.

Notebox Disorganizer is one of my favorites. I've written about it before. It's simple but powerful, and best of all, it's free! (Sorry, PC only.)

I hope you'll give these programs a try, especially if you're feeling stuck in your writing. Brainstorming, organizing, and then writing can make all the difference. Write down the chaos!

Readers Write

After reading last week's article on listing keyboard shortcuts, macro expert Paul Beverley wrote:

I have a version that spreads the list out a bit and covers more aspects. As you'll see from the attached, it's alphabetic in two ways.
http://www.wordmacrotools.com/macros/K/KeystrokeLister

Thanks to Paul for making this resource available.

Listing Keyboard Shortcuts: Two Methods

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium

As useful as custom keyboard shortcuts may be in using Microsoft Word, it's sometimes difficult to remember which keys you've assigned to what function. Word itself includes one way to find out:

Click File > Print.
Under "Settings," select "Key Assignments: List of your custom shortcut keys":
Select the printer you want to use.
Click the big "Print" button at the top left.

You'll get a document with entries that look something like this:

As useful as that might be, it's kind of a mess to read. Microsoft could have done a much better job of formatting.

As an alternative, you can list all of your custom keyboard shortcuts with this handy macro:

Sub ListKeyAssignments() 
Dim kbLoop As KeyBinding
Dim aTemp As template
For Each aTemp In Templates
    If LCase(aTemp.Name) = "Normal.dotm" Then 'You can also use the name of a different template here.
        CustomizationContext = aTemp
        For Each kbLoop In KeyBindings
            selection.InsertAfter kbLoop.Command & vbTab & kbLoop.KeyString & vbCr
            selection.Collapse Direction:=wdCollapseEnd
        Next kbLoop
    End If
Next aTemp
End Sub

You may already know how to add such macros to Word, but if not, here's how.

And you can learn here how to run it.

Now, create a new document and run the macro. You should get results like this in your new document:

Much easier to read, don't you think?

After you've created a list of your custom keyboard shortcuts, you can change them or create new ones.

I hope this helps you turn your computer into the lean, mean editing machine it was always meant to be.

Wildcard Secrets Revisited

A few weeks ago I sent out an article called "Three Wildcard Secrets." I thought they were pretty good secrets, too! You can see them here.

In a nutshell, here are the first two:

The wildcard range [A-z], meant to find any uppercase or lowercase letter, will not find accented letters. You have to use [A-Za-z] instead. So I suggested using [!A-z] (not A-z) to find any characters that are accented.

Similarly, if you need to find any unspecified Unicode character, you can use the not range [!^000-^255]. That should work, as 255 is the upper limit on ANSI characters, so anything the range finds must be Unicode.

Then I received a corrective email from macro expert Paul Beverley. The nerve! Here's what Paul had to say about secret #1:

You see the problem? It did what you asked, not what you wanted. It finds any character at all, except A-z.

And Paul is right! The range [!A-z] finds not just accented characters but also spaces, punctuation, and other stuff that isn't letters—something I knew if I'd actually thought about it. You can solve the problem by adding more things that you want to skip. Here's an example:

[!A-z 0-9.,;:\-\?\!^001-^064]

(For more information, see my Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word.)

Next, Paul had this to say about secret #2:

On my PC [!^000-^255] throws up an error:

Now technically, I was right about the range being [!^000-^255]. The problem is that Microsoft Word wants [!^001-^255] instead. And to make things even worse, that wildcard range correctly skips the ASCII characters (numbered 0-126) but incorrectly finds the extended ASCII characters (numbered 127-255), even though we've told it not to. Microsoft strikes again!

But wait, there's more!

The range [!^128-^255] gives us the same error message as [!^000-^255].
The range [!^127-^255] finds Unicode characters (which it should) and extended ASCII characters (which it should not).
The range [!^127-^254] skips extended ASCII characters (which it should) and Unicode characters (which it should not).

All of this weirdness seems to hinge on the points where ASCII becomes extended ASCII, and extended ASCII ends.

Might any of this be useful in your editing work? Yes, if you're using wildcard searches:

Use the range [!^127-^255] to find Unicode and extended ASCII characters.
Use the range [!^127-^254] to skip Unicode and extended ASCII characters.

That should work, at least until Microsoft decides to fix these problems.

Many thanks to Paul Beverley for his valuable feedback. If you'd like a bunch of free editing macros with instructions on how to use them, you'll want to download Paul's book Macros for Editors.

Three Wildcard Secrets

So, you’ve been using wildcards with Microsoft Word’s Find and Replace feature to save time and ensure consistency as you edit the plethora of freelance work that’s bombarding your inbox. Excellent. But even if you’re getting pretty good at using wildcards, there are actually a few secrets that even many experts don’t know. Maybe you’ll find them useful.

Secret #1

Using the wildcard range [A-z] to find any uppercase or lowercase letter will not find accented letters. Take, for example, the word résumé. [A-z] will find the r, s, u, and m in that word, but it will skip over the two occurrences of é. Go ahead, try it. I’ll be here when you get back.

If you actually want to skip over accented letters, [A-z] might come in handy sometime, but that will rarely be the case. To find all letters, both accented and unaccented, use the wildcard range [A-Za-z] instead. Also, as you might expect, [A-Z] finds both accented and unaccented capital letters, and [a-z] finds both accented and unaccented lowercase letters.

Okay, so [A-z] skips over accented characters; that suggests the idea that we could use a variation on that range to find only accented characters. How? Add an exclamation mark at the beginning of the range, which tells Word to find any character except what is in the range. The modified range looks like this: [!A-z]. Again, using the word résumé, [!A-z] finds the two occurrences of é but skips over r, s, u, and m. If you need to find accented characters, now you know how.

Secret #2

In a wildcard search, you can’t search for Unicode characters using numeric codes (such as ^u945), but you can copy Unicode characters from a document and paste them into Word’s Find box. You can even search for a range of Unicode characters. For example, the range [?-?] from the Greek alphabet (lowercase alpha through omega) finds every character in the Greek greeting ???? ???. You can see the range of characters in various languages by clicking Word’s Insert tab and then the Symbol button on the ribbon:

For example, here, in order, are some of the Cyrillic characters available in Word:

If you need to find any (unspecified) Unicode character in a document, you can use this not range:

[!^000-^255]

That works because 127 is the upper limit on ASCII characters and 255 is the upper limit on ANSI characters. This wildcard string excludes them both, so anything it finds must be Unicode.

Secret #3

You can use the search code ^p to search for paragraph breaks in a regular search, but not with wildcards. If you try, Word will display an error message:

So how do you search for paragraph breaks when using wildcards? Instead of ^p, use ^013. All well and good, but here’s the real secret: In Word’s Replace box, you must not use ^013; instead, use ^p. That’s right:

Find what: ^013

Replace with: ^p

Why? Because Word’s paragraph breaks are not the same thing as an ANSI paragraph break (^013). Word stores all kinds of stuff in paragraph breaks (formatting, for example), and an ANSI break is just a character like any other. I’ve occasionally had to work on documents that came from who-knows-where, and my usual wildcard searches wouldn’t work. I finally realized that those documents were using ANSI paragraph breaks rather than Word’s proprietary paragraph breaks. The solution? Once again:

Find what: ^013

Replace with: ^p

After I replaced the ANSI breaks, my wildcard searches worked again.

Bonus Secret

Microsoft Word’s wildcard search engine uses a modified version of what is widely known as RegEx—short for “regular expressions.” RegEx is more powerful than Word’s version of it, but if you’re feeling geeky, you can actually use RegEx in Word—not in Word’s Find and Replace dialogs but in a macro. If you’re interested, you can learn more here:

http://www.regular-expressions.info/vb.html

I hope you find these wildcard secrets useful. If you’re just getting started with wildcards, please check out my in-depth book on the subject, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word (ISBN 978-1-4341-0398-7), available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and other purveyors of fine technical literature.

Review: Geoff Hart’s Write Faster with Your Word Processor

I've been a fan of Geoff Hart’s books and articles since 2007, when I reviewed the first edition of his book Effective Onscreen Editing. The beauty of that book is that it applies to any software an editor might use. As Geoff explained then, “The overall goal is to teach editing strategies, not specific software.” However, in his latest book, Write Faster with Your Word Processor, Geoff changes his approach in three ways:

The book is aimed primarily at writers rather than editors, including writers of fiction. (Geoff is well known for his technical writing, but he’s also the author of several novels and short stories.)
The book focuses mainly on writing with Microsoft Word. Why? As Geoff explains, “I’ve provided Word-specific examples because most writers use Word. Moreover, I’ve learned from teaching many workshops that it’s necessary to make general strategies concrete, and Word does a great job of showing how to implement those strategies.”
The book isn’t as concerned with being effective as it is with being fast. It’s packed with useful tips and advice to help you spend less time fighting with your computer and more time actually writing. Geoff promises, “I’ll teach you how to improve your existing skills and learn new ones. As you master these skills, you’ll find yourself focusing more on the craft of writing and less on the tools themselves. That means you’ll write better and faster, with less need for revision.”

Like all of Geoff’s books, this one is thorough—I mean really thorough.

Part 1, “Get started,” explains how to personalize your computer to fit the way you work, with an emphasis on something many writers overlook: hardware. Geoff covers:

Choosing a good monitor.
Choosing a good keyboard.
Choosing a good mouse.

I can’t emphasize enough how important these are. But Geoff takes all of this a step further, covering your computer’s overall behavior, keyboard settings, mouse settings, language settings, and display settings. Then he explains how to organize your files, part of the book I'll be reading in more depth (not that I have any problems with organization). Finally, he talks about developing safeguards: security considerations, backing up your work, updating software, protecting your work with passwords, and protecting yourself from computer-related injury and other problems.

Part 2, “Write your first draft,” focuses on getting your words out of your head and into your word processor, again with an emphasis on speed. “Write first, edit later,” as the saying goes. Geoff explains in detail how to develop and use a strong outline (with a nod to those who prefer not to). Then he covers Microsoft Word’s features that are especially useful for writing (including some you probably don’t know about) as well as settings that you might want to change. Out of the box, Microsoft Word is set up to produce business memos and family newsletters; it is definitely not set up for serious writing. But the beauty of Word is that it’s practically infinitely customizable, so why not turn it into a lean, mean writing machine? Here, Geoff explains how.

I’m not going to go into much more detail about what the book includes; you’ll find a detailed table of contents on Geoff's website. I’ll just say that part 3 explains how to revise your writing once you’ve got it down (now it’s time to edit), and part 4 includes more detailed information and resources to help you back up your work and avoid stress injury, as well as a list of helpful keyboard shortcuts. The book ends with a glossary of publishing terms, a link to an online bibliography for those who want more information about a particular area, a collection of helpful internet resources, and an index that, like the rest of the book, is amazingly thorough.

Geoff writes, “My goal is NOT to teach you the writer’s craft; there are many better books for that purpose. The goal is NOT to teach you how Microsoft Word works; Word is just one of many alternatives you can use.” What, then, is the book’s purpose? “My goal,” Geoff says, “is to teach you how to write using a word processor.” And in that, he succeeds beautifully.

Write Faster With Your Word Processor is one of the most comprehensive books I’ve seen about how to write on the computer. At 352 pages (548 for the PDF version, which includes screen shots), it’s not for the faint of heart. But, as Geoff says, “I’ve provided the information in small chunks, designed for easy reading and browsing. You can dip into the book to solve a specific problem, or read it a chapter at a time to increase your mastery.” I’ll be keeping the book near at hand for those very purposes, and I recommend that you do the same.

Geoff makes it easy to buy the book. You can learn more here.

Bibliographic information: Hart, G. 2021. Write Faster With Your Word Processor. Diaskeuasis Publishing, Pointe-Claire, Quebec.

Printed version: 352 pages, including index. ISBN 978-1-927972-29-8
PDF version (suitable for most tablet computers and very large phones): 548 pages, including index. ISBN 978-1-927972-30-4
EPUB version: (unpaginated) ISBN 978-1-927972-31-1

Review: Geoff Hart’s Effective Onscreen Editing, 3rd Edition

Back in 2007, I reviewed the first edition of Geoff Hart’s book Effective Onscreen Editing, which I still keep close at hand on my bookshelf. Why? Because it’s one of the best books ever written about how to edit on a computer, packed with real-world information you’ll find nowhere else.

My own books (such as Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word) are related specifically to a certain piece of software, but the beauty of Geoff’s book is that it applies to any software an editor might use, on either Macintosh or PC (or a Linux box, for that matter). As Geoff explains, “The overall goal is to teach editing strategies, not specific software.” And in that, the book succeeds admirably.

Geoff covers all of the essentials a working editor needs to consider, including the kind of technical matters that most interest me:

Personalizing your software
Navigating and selecting text
Inserting and deleting text
Tracking revisions
Using comments
Using search tools to improve consistency
Developing style sheets
Using spelling and grammar checkers
Automating editing tasks

He also covers business matters, such as:

Determining your pay rate
Negotiating with clients
Dealing with contracts

But Geoff also addresses the ever-important human side of the editing equation, discussing such matters as:

Encouraging dialogue and communication
Security and confidentiality
E-mail alternatives
Avoiding repetitive-stress injury and other physical problems

In this new edition, Geoff has added important information about recent developments that I’ve seen covered nowhere else:

Collaborative, real-time editing over the Web.
Important new software tools for imposing consistency and applying publisher style requirements.
Proofreading PDF files, online documents, and Web pages.

You’ll find more information about the new edition here. And you’ll find a detailed table of contents here.

If you’re a working editor, you owe it to yourself to buy and read this book, which is available in print, as a nicely formatted and hyperlinked PDF, and as an ebook (free with the PDF) for use with small tablets and smartphones. I make no money from the sale of this book; I'm just an ardent fan. As I said of the first edition, I give it my highest recommendation. And besides, as an excellent writer and a respected teacher known for generously sharing his expertise, Geoff deserves your support. You can purchase the book here.

Many thanks to Geoff for creating this wonderful resource.

Hart, G. 2016. Effective onscreen editing: new tools for an old profession. 3rd ed. Diaskeuasis Publishing, Pointe-Claire, Quebec.
Printed version: 518 p. ISBN 978-1-927972-04-5
PDF version (suitable for most table computers): 827 p. ISBN 978-1-927972-05-2
EPUB version: (unpaginated) ISBN 978-1-927972-06-9

Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word

If you're editing or writing in Microsoft Word, you need to understand Word’s advanced search features. These features are extremely powerful, but they’re also virtually undocumented; most explanations of their use have been limited to a simple table of wildcards. My new book, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, explains in detail how you can use these powerful tools to blaze through repetitive problems that would take hours to correct by hand. It covers:

Using Word’s find and replace options (yes, all of them—including the hidden ones).
Finding and replacing with Word’s built-in codes (for dashes, page breaks, and much more).
Finding and replacing with numeric character codes (ASCII, ANSI, and Unicode—when regular letters and numbers aren't enough).
Finding and replacing with wildcards, including wildcard ranges, wildcard groups, and the powerful “Find What Expression” wildcard. (This is the good stuff, the real meat of this book.)

The book explains all aspects of finding and replacing in Microsoft Word, with numerous examples of wildcards used to fix real-world documents, wildcard tips and techniques from readers of Editorium Update newsletter, a reference section for ease of use, and a thorough index.

Although I write and sell Microsoft Word macros for a living, the tools I depend on most are Word's advanced find and replace features. Learning to use these tools takes time and effort, but the payoff is huge. I hope this book will help you use these tools to streamline your work, save time, and make more money!

Daniel Heuman, CEO and founder of Intelligent Editing, sent me the following unsolicited comment:

This. Is. Amazing. What a brilliant, brilliant idea! I've actually been directing people to your wildcard freebie page lately. But this is so much better! The world has needed this book for a while!

Thank you, Daniel! The book is now available at Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and other online retailers.

Resources

Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word is a fairly small (but value-packed) book (114 pages, 5.5 by 8.5 inches). My big book, Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals (632 pages, 7 by 10 inches) is now available as a free download from Intelligent Editing. All you need to do is sign up for Daniel Heuman's free newsletter, which covers a wide range of topics and provides free tips for authors and editors. I subscribe, and I think you should too. When you do, you'll get Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals as a hyperlinked, searchable PDF, perfect for easy reference in handling those tough Microsoft Word problems.

Note: The PDF includes a secret special offer right after the front cover. I won't tell you what it is; you'll need to find out for yourself. But I think you'll like it!

Better word processing: The Chicago Manual of Style interview

The Chicago Manual of Style "Shop Talk" column recently noted:

"When it comes to word processing, CMOS users probably represent every level of expertise (or nonexpertise), but regardless of skill level, we all experience frustration at times when we don’t know how to accomplish a task on our computers. Often we do something the way we’ve always done it—the slow way—because it just seems too difficult or scary to try to automate it. Is there a cure?"

There is a cure, as I explain in my interview with CMOS "Shop Talk." I grew up as a book editor by following the Chicago Manual of Style, so it was a real thrill for me to do the interview. I hope you'll find it interesting and useful.

Best wishes,

Jack Lyon

Spelunking in Microsoft Word

Laura Poole's Editorial Bootcamp

Before getting into today's main article ("Spelunking in Microsoft Word"), I want to mention a great resource: master copyeditor Laura Poole's Editorial Bootcamp, which covers everything from style guides and software to style sheets and spelling. I had the good fortune to sit in on one of Laura's sessions at this year's Communication Central conference. I sat down, buckled myself in, and set my brain to "absorb"! And wow, what a ride! Laura's training is fast, furious, and thorough—serious training for serious editors. Here's what Laura herself has to say:

The Editorial Bootcamp offers live and virtual training for copyeditors, proofreaders, groups, and publishers. With a variety of training topics available, you can find a course for you or have one customized for your organization. We have many years of experience in scholarly publishing and freelancing, and we work hard to impart useful, practical knowledge to attendees. Please see http://www.editorialbootcamp.com for details and information.

If you need editorial training from the ground up, or just need to brush up your skills, I highly recommend Laura's services.

And now, let's go spelunking!

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 of the deeper reaches of a computer program—Microsoft Word, for example. That’s one reason I know quite a bit about that particular program. Some of my friends, however, seem terrified of making a “mistake” on the computer. They want a concrete series of steps to follow in everything they do. “How can I make a word bold?” they ask. I reply:

Double-click the word to select it.
Click the “Bold” icon on the Ribbon.

Then they say, “Oh, that’s wonderful! Let me write that down for next time.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with learning to use a computer in that way, and those who are comfortable with that should keep a big Microsoft Word reference book close at hand. These are probably the same people who would enjoy taking a guided tour of Timpanogos Cave, which is about an hour away from where I live.

But that’s a far cry from spelunking, and I doubt that any of the people on the tour discover something new.

So what kind of a person are you? Do you like someone to hold your hand along the well-marked trail? Or would you rather descend into the dark depths of the cavern with only a flashlight as your guide? Either way is fine, but sometimes it’s nice to get off the beaten path; you never know what you might find. As Henry David Thoreau once said, “Nature abhors a vacuum, and if I can only walk with sufficient carelessness I am sure to be filled.”

Want to learn something new about Word? Try exploring Word’s features that aren’t on any menu, the caverns that aren’t on the map. Here’s how:

Press ALT+F8 to open the Macros dialog.
Click the dropdown list next to “Macros in.”
Select “Word Commands.”

Now, in the window under “Macro name,” you’ll see all of the commands available in Microsoft Word, whether they’re on the Ribbon or not. If you click one, you’ll see a description of its function under “Description,” at the bottom of the dialog. These descriptions are minimal at best, but along with the name of the command, they’ll give you some idea of what the command does. You can also click the “Run” button to run the command, which may give you even more insight. (Be sure to do this only with a junk document; you don’t want mess up an actual project.)

Let’s take a look. Don’t be afraid; I’ll be right behind you all the way.

So we’re scrolling through the list of Word commands in Word 2013, and what do we see? “CharacterRemoveStyle,” which, according to its description, “Clears character style from selection.” What?!? Does this mean it’s possible to remove a character style without affecting text-level formatting (such as italic)? If so, I sure didn’t know about it. Let’s find out. We type a junk sentence into a junk document:

This is a test to see what will happen.

We apply italic formatting to “test” and the character style “Emphasis” character style to “see”:

This is a test to see what will happen.

The formatting of those two words looks the same, but the formatting is not the same. Now let’s see if the “CharacterRemoveStyle” command works. We select the sentence, press ALT+F8, scroll down to “CharacterRemoveStyle,” and run it. Look at that! Our test sentence becomes:

This is a test to see what will happen.

The character style is gone, but the text-level formatting is still there. Neat!

Okay, one more, and then we’ll go back up to the surface. Down, down, down, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling. What’s this? “RestoreCharacterStyle.” I’ve never noticed that command before. The description says “Restores character style and removes direct formatting.” Could this be the inverse of the command we just finished exploring? Again we type our junk sentence and apply the same formatting as before:

This is a test to see what will happen.

Then we select the sentence and run the “RestoreCharacterStyle” command. Yes! The sentence now looks like this:

This is a test to see what will happen.

The text-level formatting is gone, but the character style remains!

But why does Microsoft say that this command restores a character style? If we remove the character style from our sentence and then run the command, does the character style come back? A quick experiment shows us that no, it doesn’t. Then why the odd name? I suspect that under the hood, Word is removing all character-level formatting but then restoring any formatting applied with a character style. It’s the equivalent of (1) identifying the character style, (2) pressing CTRL+SPACEBAR (to remove character-level formatting), and then (3) reapplying the character style — which means that the command was named from the programmer’s perspective rather than the user’s perspective. There’s a lot of stuff like that down here in the dark, and it’s part of what makes exploring so interesting.

Back up in the daylight, we assess our adventure, which I’d have to say has been a success. We’ve discovered two commands we didn’t know about before. Could they be useful in our actual editing work? Yes, indeed!

Personally, I enjoy crawling around down there in the bowels of Microsoft Word. Yes, it’s dark and it’s dirty, and sometimes I find something nasty under a rock. But I also make lots of interesting discoveries, and I nearly always learn something new.

How about you? Ready to go spelunking on your own? Have fun, and don’t forget your flashlight!

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Macros for Macs!

In Word 2008 for Macintosh, Microsoft removed all macro capability. In Word 2011 for Macintosh, Microsoft brought it back—sort of. The capability is there, but compatibility with Word for Windows is somewhat lacking. And that's why the programs from the Editorium have not been available for Word 2011.

I'm pleased to report, though, that our FileCleaner program is, at last, available for Word 2011 on Macintosh. You can download the program by clicking here.

FileCleaner cleans up common problems in electronic manuscripts, including multiple spaces, multiple returns, unnecessary tabs, improperly typed ellipses, ells used as ones, and much more. It turns double hyphens into em dashes, and hyphens between numerals into en dashes. It can also remove directly applied font formatting (such as Times 12 point) while retaining styles (such as Heading 1) and character formatting (such as italic and bold). The program includes batch processing so you can clean up all open documents or a whole folder full of documents to maximize your productivity, doing in minutes what used to take hours to do by hand. This new version also includes the option to track the changes made while cleaning up.

This is a major new version of FileCleaner that has taken much time and expense to create. For that reason, users will need to purchase a new license for the program, even if they already have a license for the previous version. (A previous password/registration code will not work.) But at $29.95 it's a bargain. The program will pay for itself the first time you use it on any substantial editing job. Then it will pay for itself again on the next job. And the next. Out of all of our programs, this is the one I use most. It's a real workhorse that every serious editor should have.

You can, of course, try the new version for 45 days to make sure it does what you need. After that, you'll need a password/registration code to keep the program from timing out. When you're ready to buy a license for the new version, you can do so by clicking this link.

I'd also be grateful for any feedback you'd care to provide after trying the new version.

Now that I have most of the kinks worked out on the Macintosh, our other programs will also become available, one by one, in the near future. Next up: NoteStripper. Thanks for your patience!

Programs from the Editorium

Have you checked out the Editorium's latest Microsoft Word add-ins to help with your work?

IndexLinker creates hyperlinks from index page numbers back to the text to which they refer. If you're creating ebooks or PDFs with indexes, you need this program.

BookMaker automates typesetting and page layout in Microsoft Word. Stop fighting with page breaks, headers, and footers. Let BookMaker do the heavy lifting.

LyXConverter converts Word documents into LyX documents.

And, of course, many other useful add-ins are available as well, including Editor's ToolKit Plus.

A Special Deal: Editor's Toolkit Ultimate!

Editor's ToolKit Ultimate combines three great products:

Editor's ToolKit Plus from The Editorium.
PerfectIt Pro from Intelligent Editing.
EditTools from WordnSync.

The three products work together to create a powerful editing package to take you through three separate stages of copyediting.

Communication Conference

Wondering how to launch or improve an editorial business, whether you offer writing, editing, proofreading, indexing or other related services? Come to “Be a Better Freelancer! (Re)Invent Your Business,” the ninth annual Communication Central conference for freelancers, September 26–27, 2014, in Rochester, NY, with an Editorial Bootcamp on September 28 at the same location.

Topics include launching your business, macros and other efficiency/productivity tools, working with MS Office, organization tips, a self-publishing roundtable, balancing freelancing and family life, resources, benefiting from social media, and more. Keynote speaker is Jake “Dr. Freelance” Poinier. Other speakers include Erin Brenner, Ally Machate, April Michelle Davis, Daniel Heuman, Katharine O’Moore-Klopf, Dick Margulis, Greg Ioannou, Geoff Hart, Jack Lyon, Laura Poole, Ben Davis, Amy Schneider, and Ruth E. Thaler-Carter.

Interested in Laura Poole’s editorial bootcamp? Info for the Editorial Bootcamp is included in the conference registration PDF. The Editorial Bootcamp may be taken without attending the conference.

You'll find more information here:

http://www.communication-central.com/

Questions? Contact Communication Central owner Ruth E. Thaler-Carter, at conference@communication-central.com or 585-248-0318.