Author Archives: Jack Lyon

Last week we talked about using Hidden formatting to make sure a list sorts properly. But Hidden formatting is useful for other things as well. Let’s say you’re editing a scholarly book with dozens of block quotations from old journals. The author has consistently misspelled several geographical and personal names, so you fire up our […]

In our last newsletter, we talked about how to work with lists. You can read the newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1702467672. I presented the following list of book titles, noting that I’d removed the initial “The” from The Old Man and the Sea and The Great Gatsby so they’d sort properly: To Kill a Mockingbird Jane Eyre […]

In my other life I work at a publishing house, so quite often I compile and edit lists of book titles, authors, type specs–all kinds of things. (I just finished putting together a list of nearly 1,400 book titles for a giant electronic publishing project.) A typical list looks like this: To Kill a Mockingbird […]

Recently a Microsoft Word user asked me, “Is there an easy way to print the names and descriptions of the styles I’m using in my document?” Fortunately, there is. Here’s the procedure: 1. Click the File menu. 2. Click “Print.” 3. Click the “Print what” box at the lower left of the Print dialog box. […]

After I published our last issue, in which I hammered on “paper” editors fairly hard, LeAnne Baird wrote to remind me that there are times when editing on paper may be the best way to go. What are those times? Here are a few for your consideration: 1. When training is at least as important […]

Editorium Update usually just assumes that you’re editing on the computer, specifically in Microsoft Word. But *why* should you edit on the computer? Because, to attain the same level of quality, it’s cheaper than editing on paper–cheaper in money, time, and stress. I’ve heard editors complain that they don’t like to edit on the computer […]

Last week we talked about Microsoft Word’s Spike feature, which lets you cut as many blocks of text as you want (like sticking them on a spike) and then paste them all at once in your chosen location. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1701584333 But what if you want to *copy* rather than […]

Remember when editors wore green celluloid visors and impaled pieces of paper on a shiny steel spike? Word, too, has a spike, but it’s buried so deep that most Word users have never even heard of it. The Spike is a *cumulative* cut and paste. It lets you cut as many blocks of text as […]

In our last newsletter, I promised to tell you about Word’s Extend Selection feature, which I’ve assigned to the Insert key in our Editor’s ToolKit program. Extend Selection, a terrific tool, is often overlooked because it’s not included on a menu or a toolbar. It’s also not covered well in Word’s documentation (so what else […]