Author Archives: Jack Lyon

While editing in Microsoft Word, I often need to find something that’s *partially* formatted and replace it with something else. For example, let’s say a manuscript has a bunch of superscript note numbers preceded by a space that’s *not* in superscript. Here’s an example (with carets indicating superscript): Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet. ^1^ I’d […]

I hope you’ve enjoyed the wildcard “tutorial” articles in Editorium Update over the past few weeks. If you haven’t read them, I’d recommend that you do so in order to understand this week’s article. You can review the whole series here, starting with the March 20, 2001, issue: http://www.editorium.com/euindex.htm/ This week I thought you might […]

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about using wildcards to find and replace text in Microsoft Word. Last week I introduced the “Find What Expression” wildcard (n) and promised to show you how to use it to move things around. Let’s say you’ve got a list of authors, like this: Emily Dickinson Ezra […]

For the past few weeks we’ve been talking about using wildcards to find and replace text in Microsoft Word. This week we’ll discuss wildcard grouping, which is simply a way of telling Word that you want certain wildcards to be used together as a unit. Continuing with our example from last week, let’s say that […]

Last week we discussed using wildcard combinations to find text in a Microsoft Word document. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706069286 This week we’ll talk about wildcard ranges, which you’ll probably use a lot. Wildcard ranges are fairly simple. You just use the [-] wildcard to tell Microsoft Word what to find. Let’s […]

Last week we discussed the basics of using wildcards to find text in a Microsoft Word document. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705963026 This week we’ll talk about how to combine wildcards, which will let you get pretty fancy about the stuff you want to find. Basically, you just need to know that […]

Subscriber Allene Goforth (agoforth@aros.net) wrote: “I use your ‘Searching with Microsoft Word’s Built-In Codes’ list all the time, but Word’s restrictions on what codes can be used in the ‘Replace with’ box are a pain. I’d love to see an issue of Editorium Update that deals with wildcard searching.” Thanks for the suggestion, Allene. Here […]

Last week I explained how to use Word’s Rand feature to create sample text (“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”) that you can use for various purposes. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705763701 I neglected to mention that for the Rand feature to work, “Replace text as you type” must […]

Working in Microsoft Word, I often need some “junk” text to play around with, for various reasons: * I’m designing a document and don’t want to get bogged down in what the text actually says. * I’m creating a template with various paragraph styles and need to see what they will look like. * I’m […]

This week subscriber Doug Clapp, proprietor of PocketPCpress (http://www.pocketpcpress.com/), wrote with an interesting question. He’d received a book that had been typeset in QuarkXPress (Doug didn’t have QuarkXPress) and sent to him as a “stuffed” (.sit) Macintosh file (Doug didn’t have the StuffIt program or a Macintosh). What Doug *needed* was an unstuffed Microsoft Word […]