Author Archives: Jack Lyon

Here it is, 2007 already. So it seems appropriate to look at Word 2007 and see if it’s something editors and other publishing professionals might find useful. You’ll find Microsoft’s sales pitch here: http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word/FX100487981033.aspx You should know ahead of time that I’m jaded, biased, and curmudgeonly when it comes to Microsoft’s upgrades to Word. My […]

I’ve recently needed to help several people convert Microsoft Word text boxes to text. Is there something in the wind? Whatever is going on, if you’re having to copy and paste, copy and paste, to get that text out where you can use it, you’ll appreciate the following macro, which pulls text-box text out as […]

In our last episode, I provided a macro to make a list of misspelled words found in a document. You’ll find the macro here: http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1720027612 So you’ve got your list; now how do you use it? The way *I* recently used it on a multivolume typesetting project was to automatically fix a bunch of archaic […]

I’ve been working on a really big set of really big books that use odd, archaic spellings. Wanting to modernize those spellings, I decided to create a macro that would list every word that Microsoft Word sees as misspelled. You’ll find the macro a little farther down, but before using it, you’ll need to tell […]

Back in January 2003 I published an article called “WordPerfect Weirdness,” which featured a macro for converting “special” characters (dashes, quotation marks, and the like) in a file imported from WordPerfect to Word. You can read the article here: http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1711839353 Unfortunately, the macro isn’t reliable with more recent versions of Word, and I needed an […]

When I was in first grade, a magician came to our school, and I’ve been interested in magic ever since. One thing I’ve learned is that magic is largely psychological; it depends heavily on what magicians call “misdirection”–getting the audience to look at or think about something that furthers the magician’s deception. This principle can […]

Remember WordPerfect, with its cardboard template that showed which function keys did what? I liked it; you can tell because I created similar templates for my Editor’s ToolKit and DEXter programs: http://www.editorium.com/14857.htm http://www.editorium.com/dexter.htm But if you just want to see the function-key assignments in regular old Microsoft Word (2000 and above), there is a secret […]

In trying to explain how Word’s Find and Replace (FnR) wildcard mechanism works, I’ll also present a practical solution to the multitude of problems encountered by the seemingly innocuous ^p^p to ^p, whose usual objective is to remove unnecessary blank lines. In doing so, we shall traverse the width of Word’s pitfalls that never fail […]