Author Archives: Jack Lyon

In our last newsletter, I complained about accidentally hitting the Insert key and thus turning on Overstrike by mistake. Microsoft Word lets you reassign the Insert key to paste the contents of the Clipboard, but that brings its own set of problems. Subscriber Kathy Anderson suggested using the Insert key as an additional Delete key. […]

It happens all the time: I’m editing merrily along in Microsoft Word only to discover that I’ve accidentally hit the Insert key, turning on Overstrike. Now I’ve typed over the top of a whole sentence and who knows what else. Aarrgh! I wish I could rip that key right off my keyboard. After I calm […]

A longtime, highly skilled editor I know likes to keep track of how much she’s tightened a manuscript, and she does it by counting words or pages as she works. This is especially useful if a publication (a magazine, for example) has only so much room for a particular article. But it may also be […]

If you’re like me, you’ve often made an editorial correction in Microsoft Word and then, five pages later, changed your mind. But where was that correction? Word includes a feature that will take you back to your last change, then the change before that, and so on, cycling through the last four changes in your […]

It’s hard to beat Microsoft Word if you’re editing a document with footnotes or endnotes. If you add or delete a note, the other notes renumber automatically (assuming the notes haven’t been typed as body text and numbered manually), and the program provides a notes “pane” that allows you to edit all of your notes […]

Just another pretty face? Nothing wrong with that. If you’re editing in Microsoft Word, why not use a typeface that you’re comfortable reading and that makes editing easy? (Unless, of course, you’re editing documents that have already been carefully formatted for typesetting.) You can always apply the final typeface and formatting after your editing is […]

As I’ve trained editors working in Microsoft Word, I’ve noticed a strange phenomenon: Left to their own devices, some editors will scroll for pages using only the UP ARROW and DOWN ARROW keys (the cursor keys). That’s like using a toothbrush to paint your house. This is going to sound pretty basic, but there’s a […]

When I edit a document in Microsoft Word, I do everything I can from the keyboard. I avoid using the mouse because reaching over to get it interrupts the flow of work and slows me down. Sometimes, though, for a change of pace, I like to see how much editing I can do without even […]

Microsoft Word comes with a collection of secret macros. Well, okay, they’re not really secret, but they’re often overlooked. And they can be pretty useful if you know they exist and understand how to use them. Editors may be particularly interested in the following: FindSymbol: A macro that allows you to find and replace symbols […]

One of the advantages of editing on paper is that you can lay out the various pages, one here, one there, for reference and comparison with each other. For example, you may need to refer to a certain paragraph on page 10 while editing a paragraph on page 300. On the computer, this is a […]