Jack Lyon

Numbers by Chicago

I recently worked on a manuscript with lots of source citations, many of which had page numbers formatted like this:

122-123

I prefer the shorter style recommended in the Chicago Manual of Style (8.69):

122-23

And besides, the manuscript was inconsistent, sometimes using one style, sometimes the other. Not wanting to fix all of these by hand, I decided to put the old wildcard search to work. You can learn about searching with wildcards in my free paper "Advanced Find and Replace in Microsoft Word":

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

The first thing I needed to do was simplify things. Consider the style for even hundreds:

100-109

100-119

100-201

In all such cases, the numbers were already in the correct style, so I decided to just get them out of the way, like this:

Find What:

00-

Replace With:

~~-

(Those tildes are just arbitrary placeholders to be turned back to zeroes later.)

With that taken care of, I originally thought I could change all the other numbers like this:

Find What:

([0-9]{3}-)[0-9]([0-9]{2})

Replace With:

That "Find What" string finds any set of three {3} numbers [0-9] followed by a hyphen, followed by a single number [0-9], followed by any set of two {2} numbers [0-9]. The items in parentheses are treated as as a group.

The "Replace With" string replaces the first 1 parenthetical group with itself and the second 2 parenthetical group with itself, leaving out any number [0-9] that was not grouped in parentheses.

That will definitely change 122-123 to 122-23, but it will also change 308-309 to 308-09, so we'll need to get a little fancier. How about this?

Find What:

([0-9]{3}-)[0-9]([1-9]{2})

Replace With:

Notice that I've changed that last number range to [1-9] rather than [0-9]. That means numbers like 308-309 will not be found but numbers like 308-319 will. (Come to think of it, that single number in the middle could probably be [1-9] as well, since there shouldn't be any page numbers like 308-019. Of course, you never know.) Now, does that solve the problem?

Well, no. We still need to deal with numbers like this:

398-415

We certainly don't want that changing to 398-15. And what about this?

247-517

Unlikely, I'll admit, but still possible.

And that means we can't do our find and replace all in one shot. Instead, we'll have to do 18 specific searches:

(1[0-9]{2}-)1([1-9][0-9])

(2[0-9]{2}-)2([1-9][0-9])

(3[0-9]{2}-)3([1-9][0-9])

(4[0-9]{2}-)4([1-9][0-9])

(5[0-9]{2}-)5([1-9][0-9])

(6[0-9]{2}-)6([1-9][0-9])

(7[0-9]{2}-)7([1-9][0-9])

(8[0-9]{2}-)8([1-9][0-9])

(9[0-9]{2}-)9([1-9][0-9])

(10[1-9]-)10([1-9])

(20[1-9]-)20([1-9])

(30[1-9]-)30([1-9])

(40[1-9]-)40([1-9])

(50[1-9]-)50([1-9])

(60[1-9]-)60([1-9])

(70[1-9]-)70([1-9])

(80[1-9]-)80([1-9])

(90[1-9]-)90([1-9])

At least that's how it looks to me. If you have a better way, I'd love to hear about it.

You can do the searches by hand if you like. You've got 20 chapters, all in separate files? Let's see--20 x 18 = 360 separate searches. Ouch! Of course, you could use my MegaReplacer program to do them all at once, freeing up your time for something more interesting:

http://www.editorium.com/14843.htm

Don't forget, we still need to turn those tildes back into zeroes:

Find What:

Replace With:

Now all of those page numbers should be in Chicago style. How beautiful!

"What about four-digit numbers?" you ask. I leave it as an exercise for you to work out.

If you'd like this whole thing ready to run in MegaReplacer, here it is:

00-|~~-

(1[0-9]{2}-)1([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(2[0-9]{2}-)2([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(3[0-9]{2}-)3([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(4[0-9]{2}-)4([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(5[0-9]{2}-)5([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(6[0-9]{2}-)6([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(7[0-9]{2}-)7([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(8[0-9]{2}-)8([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(9[0-9]{2}-)9([1-9][0-9])|12+m

(10[1-9]-)10([1-9])|12+m

(20[1-9]-)20([1-9])|12+m

(30[1-9]-)30([1-9])|12+m

(40[1-9]-)40([1-9])|12+m

(50[1-9]-)50([1-9])|12+m

(60[1-9]-)60([1-9])|12+m

(70[1-9]-)70([1-9])|12+m

(80[1-9]-)80([1-9])|12+m

(90[1-9]-)90([1-9])|12+m

~~|00

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Mary Russell wrote:

I'm working on a revision of an encyclopedia on world religions that already has a 108-page word list and a 1,000-page index of terms I need to check *everything* against. I'm using your style sheet macro to slap each term I want to check into the style sheet as I go and then doing a separate pass to check them all--and having them alphabetized saves me a lot of scrolling around in those files. By the way, I *love* your macro. I run the style sheet minimized and don't even have to switch back to my original document. You should really be selling this one. I'm usually more restrained, but this really is a great idea.

--------------------------------

Meg Cox wrote:

Joy Freeman on Freelance suggested a new approach that I think will alleviate the style sheet challenge considerably. I haven't tried it yet, but I'm going to on the next chapter I start. She gave her permission to repeat the approach here:

With each occurrence of a new name, search for the same and replace it with itself in a different color (say, blue). Then you know you've already encountered it and don't need to check it against the style sheet. That way you only have to take action with variations and first occurrences. If it's blue, move on through!

I suspect this approach will come in very handy the next time I have a manuscript with hundreds of unfamiliar personal, place, and organizational names, and it will help in simpler projects as well.

Another way it will help: Sometimes in a long chapter it's hard to remember whether the full name of a person or organization has appeared yet (my clients routinely ask for full version on first occurrence in each chapter, then shortened version thereafter). If the changing to blue is done chapter by chapter (and I think it could be handled quickly--I need to think macro on this), blue will mean the full version has already occurred and an abbreviation or last-name-only may be called for. Could be useful for long sets of notes too so I know when it's time to go with a short citation! (Lately I'm seeing plenty of chapters with 70 or more notes.) Oh, and good for parenthetical citations too, so I know what I've already checked against bibliography.

[Editor's note: Our RazzmaTag program would be very useful for this kind of thing: http://www.editorium.com/razzmatag.htm.]

--------------------------------

Brad Hurley wrote:

Steve Hudson wrote:

I'd like to advise you and your readers to avoid Outlook

2003. It has more bugs than the NSW locust plague here in

Australia at the moment. I could fill an article with simple

features that cause immediate failures.

This is almost the opposite of my experience. I've been using Outlook 2003 daily on my Windows 2000 machine since last October, and it has never crashed. I have encountered several bugs and design flaws, but overall my experience has been positive. The much-improved spam filtering and the new three-pane design make it a far better program than previous versions. The upgrade from Outlook 2000 went flawlessly and it handles my large e-mail archive files (300-600 megabytes each) without a complaint. The only serious problems I've noticed so far are:

1. Editing a message in your outbox makes it impossible to send; you have to transfer it to a different folder and send it from there.

2. E-mail address auto-complete doesn't work if your contact's address book entry also has a fax number listed (this is a very frustrating flaw because Outlook should be smart enough to know you're not trying to send a fax when you've composed an e-mail message to someone).

3. Hitting the return button to start a search only works once a session; after that you have to use your mouse to click the "find now" button.

Other than that, I'm satisfied with Outlook 2003; in fact it's the only element in the Office suite that I've found worth upgrading from the 2000 versions.

Many thanks to Mary, Meg, and Brad for their helpful tips and comments.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

Bruce Koehler wrote:

Another approach to handling accidental press of the Insert key and other keys (e.g. Caps Lock) is a small freeware program called FirstCap. It allows you to set up these potentially problematic keys in various ways such as:

* Disable

* Disable--but with a work-around to re-enable once or continuously sound an alert when pressed

Terrific little program. Just Google search on "FirstCap" for many sites that offer it.

And while I'm at it, here are a few more that would be useful to Word users:

Memokeys: "MemoKeys can help you to fill forms faster, to execute repetitive tasks without having to type every time the same text or keystrokes. The principle is simple: MemoKeys creates associations between key combinations on your keyboard and some predetermined texts or system actions . . . " Uses a Function key (F12, for example) plus an alphanumeric key. Works in all programs.

MinMax extender: adds icons by the "-" and "X" icons at the upper right of a window to allow rollup, expand window to full screen width or height (and undo), etc.

FileEx (shareware--not free): can expand most dialog boxes--a great help in Word--also allows a different default Save destination (great when you're opening a lot of files in one folder but want to save them to another location).

Many thanks to Bruce for suggesting these programs. Bruce also suggested asking newsletter readers if they know of other editing or Word-related shareware and freeware. If you do, please let us know, and we'll list them in the next newsletter: mailto:resources [at symbol] editorium.com

Fixing Typos Automatically

All this talk about editorial style sheets in the past couple of newsletters got me thinking again about lists of automatic corrections. Long ago, I wrote about this and provided a couple of such lists:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708048908

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708127357

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708293844

I now realize, however, that those lists don't include nearly as many typographical errors as they could. I'm talking about errors like these:

abbout (about)

yeild (yield)

yera (year)

yoiu (you)

yoiur (your)

So here, for your editorial pleasure, is a giant list (more than 1,200 entries) compiled from various typo and AutoCorrect collections:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/typolist.zip

The list is currently set up for use with our MegaReplacer program, with entries like this:

abbout|about+w

yeild|yield+w

yera|year+w

yoiu|you+w

yoiur|your+w

Words before the pipe symbol (|) contain the typos. Words after the pipe symbol are their replacements. And the +w at the end of each entry tells Word to search for "Whole words only." MegaReplacer will run such a list on the active document, all open documents, or all documents in a folder, fixing all of the typos in one fell swoop.

Of course, Word's spell checker will also catch these typos--if you want to click, click, click through them all manually. But why not put MegaReplacer to work while you do something more worthwhile? Of course, running that giant list on a bunch of documents could take a while, so you might want to (1) pare down the list to include only those entries you think you'll really need and (2) run it on fewer documents at a time. You can learn more about MegaReplacer here:

http://www.editorium.com/14843.htm

You might also want to use some of these entries (minus the pipe symbols and +w's) in your AutoCorrect list (some of them are probably already there). Feel free!

FROM WORD 2K TO 2003: WORD'S TASK PANES VBA REFERENCE

Wordmeister Steve Hudson sent his most recent article in his series about Word 2003--a sneak preview especially for Editorium Update readers before the article is published elsewhere. The article covers one of Word's most important features, the Task Pane, with an emphasis on VBA, and Steve covers the topic in almost unbelievable detail. If you want the real scoop, look no further. You can download Steve's article by clicking here:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/taskpane.zip

Steve also wrote:

I'd like to advise you and your readers to avoid Outlook 2003. It has more bugs than the NSW locust plague here in Australia at the moment. I could fill an article with simple features that cause immediate failures.

If you are happy to live with plain text emails, you get fewer problems. Not none, fewer. Rules are broken, insofar as there are several options that crash Outlook when you select them. Contacts has a few problems that sporadically cause crashes; even picking names from your address book goes belly up regularly. 🙁 No Service Packs as of yet.

I'm putting up with it, as the rest of Office 2003 is very nice.

Many thanks to Steve for doing intense research on Office 2003 and making it available for our use.

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Andrew Savikas wrote:

Two quick tips came to mind while I was checking out your archives that might interest readers of your newsletter:

1. The primary motivation for most users when re-assigning the Insert key is to avoid accidental invocation of the cursed Overtype feature; adding a new function to the Insert key is just a bonus. To accomplish the former semi-permanently, just intercept the command:


Sub Overtype()
' Do nothing (or do something else)
End Sub

Then users can re-assign or un-assign the Insert key at will, without any fear of Overtype returning.

[For more information, see the past newsletters here:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1701260280

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1701366500]

2. Style aliases are indispensable but can cause problems when exporting to a different format. This macro removes them (Word 2000+ for Windows):


Sub RemoveStyleAliases()
Dim sty As Style
For Each sty In ActiveDocument.Styles
sty.NameLocal = Split(sty.NameLocal, ",")(0)
Next sty
End Sub

[For more information, see the past newsletter here:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703188741]

If you don't know how to use such macros, you can find out here.

--------------------------------

Meg Cox wrote:

Some editors don't like to alphabetize an editorial style sheet as they go along. For me, it's essential if the style sheet is to be usable--especially in a book with a million personal and place names, and especially if it's about an unfamiliar geographical region.

Without keeping the style sheet in alphabetical order, I'm not going to spot the close-but-not-quite situations. Case in point: in my style-sheet-nightmare project, the author was rendering the names every which way. Was it Leon Mba or Leon M'ba? With an accent on the e or not? Denis Sassou-Nguesso with or without the accent, with or without the hyphen? Sassou-Nguesso as surname only, or just Nguesso? Or Sassou Nguesso? Some names appeared infrequently enough that I never would have been able to remember whether they had come up before and how they had been rendered. (This 700-page manuscript covered politics in 14 francophone African countries over a period of 120 years.)

Even in easier projects, it's the alphabetization that enables me to spot the inconsistencies as I go along so I can change them all to the same thing. In the 14-countries project, it would have been no easy matter to go back and search and replace later because the versions of the names varied too widely, so I had to decide on the first occasion of each inconsistency. If the author wanted to go with a version different from what I had settled on, once they were all consistent I would have been able to do a global search and replace. (Thank goodness in this case cleanup was in-house!)

If I wasn't working in history and political science, this wouldn't be as much of an issue.

As it turned out, I didn't come up with a good way to do what I wanted to do. Maybe I could have with more fiddling, but I finally needed to just give up and keep moving through all the names.

Many thanks to Andrew and Meg for their helpful tips and comments.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

The Design Science site has some marvelous advanced tutorials on Word's AutoCorrect feature:

http://www.dessci.com/en/support/tutorials/autocorrect/tutorial.htm

http://www.dessci.com/en/support/tutorials/autocorrect/advanced.htm

Restoring Superscript to Note Numbers

I get manuscripts with all kinds of weird formatting, but recently I got one from which all formatting had been removed. That might have been all right, but the note reference numbers were no longer superscript; they all looked something like this.42 I wasn't about to fix all those by hand, so I came up with this solution, which I hope you'll find as useful as I did:

1. Back up your documents, just in case.

2. Call up Word's Replace dialog (Edit > Replace).

3. In the "Find What" box, enter this (just copy and paste it from this article):

([! 0123456789,:$(])([0-9]{1,})

4. In the "Replace With" box, enter this:

5. Click the "More" button if it's available.

6. Put a check in the "Use wildcards" checkbox.

7. Click the "Replace All" button.

8. In the "Find What" box, enter this:

(*)

9. In the "Replace With" box, enter this (formatted as superscript):

10. Click the "Replace All" button.

All of your note numbers should now be in glorious superscript.

Want to know more about two-step finding and replacing?

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706553959

Want to know more about wildcard searching?

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/advancedfind.zip

Want to know how to remove directly applied document formatting without removing superscript, italic, bold, and so on?

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1709845068

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

After reading last week's newsletter with its editorial style sheet macros, Jim Pinkham wrote:

You can also overcome the limitation on having only two Word docs open to make Hilary's macro run by simply specifying the windows you wish to switch between in the macro. For example, here's a snippet from one of mine:

Selection.SelectRow

Selection.Cut

Windows("Blue Rows.doc").Activate

Selection.Paste

Windows("Weekly Improvement Analysis March 22-28.doc").Activate

When I use this macro, I'll create a new "Weekly Improvement Analysis" doc each time--so I simply edit the file name accordingly.

--------------------

Pamela Angulo wrote:

As I read today's newsletter, 2004/05/05: Editorial Style Sheet Macro, I wondered why anyone editing and creating a style sheet on a computer would be concerned about pasting copied style terms by letter or in alphabetical order. (Organizing terms by type--names, places, scientific terminology, etc.--now, that I understand.)

I copy terms to my style sheet as I go, in the order they present themselves--more or less from top to bottom of the manuscript. For some jobs (e.g., chapters by multiple authors for the same book, or individual articles for inclusion in a single magazine issue), I keep track of chapter, article, or author for each term as well. But however I handle the initial list, I sort the terms alphabetically later, *not* while I'm copying and pasting (too much time, and too much brain!).

I create different versions of the style sheet for different purposes: A single comprehensive alphabetical list for a multiple-part project allows me and the proofreader to cross-check terms across the entire project, which is always helpful; several individual alphabetical lists sorted by chapter, article, or author allow me to send only the relevant list to each author for review.

With Table > Sort in Word, arranging my style sheet in alpha order is a no-brainer, and I like that after a long day at the helm. 🙂 BTW, some people don't realize that this command will work on *any* list; the list doesn't have to be in a table.

A while back, a copyeditor posted to Freelance asking how to convert her style sheet into a table so she could sort it. It struck me *hard* then that one person's "no duh!" (it's soooo obvious) is very often another person's "no way!" (never would have thought of that).

Many thanks to Jim and Pamela for their helpful tips and observations.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

The EServer TCLibrary of editing articles has a wealth of information on all kinds of publishing topics. Wow, look at all this great stuff!

http://tc.eserver.org/dir/Articles/Editing

Editorial Style Sheet Macro

Last week's newsletter provided a style sheet that editors can use to keep track of style decisions while editing in Microsoft Word. If you didn't get that style sheet, you can download it here:

http://www.editorium.com/ftp/stylesheet.zip

Hilary Powers was kind enough to provide her StyleThat macro in last week's newsletter, and this week I've adapted that macro to work with the editorial style sheet. If you select some text in a document you're editing and then run this macro, it will switch to your editorial style sheet and paste the text under the alphabetical heading where it belongs: ABCD, EFGH, and so on. See last week's newsletter for more information:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1716659834

And now, here's the macro:

'THE MACRO STARTS HERE
Sub StyleThat()
'Macro adapted by Hilary Powers 1/30/04; updated 4/6/04
'Adapted by Jack M. Lyon for use with editorial style sheet
If Selection.Type = wdSelectionIP Then  'No selection
GoTo HedBack
Else
FirstChar = Asc(Selection.Characters.First)
If FirstChar > 64 And FirstChar < 69 Then MySearch = "ABCD^p"
If FirstChar > 68 And FirstChar < 73 Then MySearch = "EFGH^p"
If FirstChar > 72 And FirstChar < 77 Then MySearch = "IJKL^p"
If FirstChar > 76 And FirstChar < 81 Then MySearch = "MNOP^p"
If FirstChar > 80 And FirstChar < 85 Then MySearch = "QRST^p"
If FirstChar > 84 And FirstChar < 91 Then MySearch = "UVWXYZ^p"
If FirstChar > 96 And FirstChar < 101 Then MySearch = "ABCD^p"
If FirstChar > 100 And FirstChar < 105 Then MySearch = "EFGH^p"
If FirstChar > 104 And FirstChar < 109 Then MySearch = "IJKL^p"
If FirstChar > 108 And FirstChar < 113 Then MySearch = "MNOP^p"
If FirstChar > 112 And FirstChar < 117 Then MySearch = "QRST^p"
If FirstChar > 116 And FirstChar < 123 Then MySearch = "UVWXYZ^p"
If FirstChar > 90 And FirstChar < 97 Then MySearch = "Comments:^p"
If FirstChar < 65 Or FirstChar > 122 Then MySearch = "Comments:^p"
Selection.Copy
WordBasic.NextWindow
WordBasic.StartOfDocument
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.Text = MySearch
.Forward = True
.Wrap = wdFindStop
.Format = False
.MatchCase = True
.MatchWholeWord = False
.MatchAllWordForms = False
.MatchSoundsLike = False
.MatchWildcards = False
End With
Selection.Find.Execute
Selection.MoveRight
Selection.Paste
Selection.TypeParagraph
GoTo Final
End If
HedBack:
WordBasic.NextWindow
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
Final:
End Sub
'THE MACRO ENDS HERE

If you don't know how to use such macros, you can find out here.

And you can learn how to assign them to a hot key here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1713088939

Note that you don't have to use the macro with *my* style sheet. It will work with any document in which you've included the following headings, each followed by a carriage return:

ABCD

EFGH

IJKL

MNOP

QRST

UVWXYZ

Comments:

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

Last week, expert word whacker Hilary Powers sent her StyleThat macro, which I proceeded to gum up. The problem was, it didn't want to work correctly in Word 2000; possibly some of the commands are specific to Word 2003. At any rate, here is Hilary's macro in its pristine state, and many thanks to her for providing it.

Hilary wrote, "The macro relies on having two [and only two] files open at a time. The truly charming thing is that you can use one hot key for both chores: putting something on the style sheet and also priming the style sheet for its next use and returning to the main document.

'THE MACRO STARTS HERE
Sub StyleThat()
' Macro adapted by Hilary Powers 1/30/04; updated 4/6/04
If Selection.Type = wdSelectionIP Then
GoTo HedBack
Else
Selection.Copy
WordBasic.NextWindow
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdPasteDefault)
GoTo Final
End If
HedBack:
Selection.TypeParagraph
WordBasic.NextWindow
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
Final:
End Sub
'THE MACRO ENDS HERE

If you don't know how to use such macros, you can find out here.

And you can learn how to assign them to a hot key here:

http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1713088939

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

I've been fighting the battle against spam (junk email) but not very effectively, even though I've tried a couple of top-notch spam-fighting programs. Then this week I decided to try SpamArrest, and I'm thrilled to say it's actually won the war. Boy, has my inbox been quiet.

When people send me an email message, they receive an email message in return that asks them to click a link to register themselves (a one-time operation) as someone who can send me messages. Spammers, of course, won't bother to do this, which basically means no more spam. It's easy to preregister family, friends, associates, and email newsletters to which I subscribe. The completely online program (no software involved) gives me complete control over how spam is handled, and it's very easy to use.

If you'd like to know more, click here:

http://spamarrest.com/affl?1403707

And if you decide to sign up, please do so through the link above. Since I'm now a SpamArrest affiliate, your support will help keep Editorium Update alive and kicking. Thanks!

Changing Word's Memory Allocation

Editors are often afraid to work on big documents in Microsoft Word. I routinely work on documents larger than 300 pages, so I'm not sure what all the fuss is about. I do believe in having plenty of RAM (random access memory) on a computer (at least 256 megabytes), so that helps. Also, most of my documents don't include graphics, which I know can bog things down in Word.

If you need to work on big documents with lots of graphics and find that Word often runs slowly or locks up, you may appreciate a tip from Word guru Woody Leonhard:

http://www.wopr.com

On page 270 of his book "Word 97 Annoyances," Woody explains how to change Word's memory allocation. Here are the basic instructions:

1. Run Regedit (Start > Run > Regedit).

2. Find HKEY_CURRENT-USERSoftwareMicrosoftOffice8.0WordOptions. [You might have a different version number, such as 9.0.]

3. Double-click on the key and back it up by clicking Registry > Export Registry File. If something goes wrong, this will let you restore the existing settings later.

4. Click Edit > New > String Value. Type in the name "CacheSize" and hit Enter twice. Type in 2048 and hit Enter.

5. Click Edit > New > String Value. Type in the name "BitMapMemory" and hit Enter twice. Type in 2048 and hit Enter.

6. Click File > Exit to leave the registry and save your changes.

What this does is tell Word to reserve 2048 KB of memory (instead of the meager default of 64) for documents (CacheSize) and graphics (BitMapMemory).

You don't have to use 2048, either; you can use lesser amounts, such as 1024. It's up to you. But the more you use, the less memory will be available for other programs that are running.

Don't mess with anything else in the registry. Doing so can cause all kinds of problems. And even for these settings, you change them at your own risk.

Macintosh users should simply be able to change the memory allocation for Microsoft Word.

Interested in learning more about Woody Leonhard's classic book "Word 97 Annoyances"? You can check it out here:

http://www.woodyswatch.com/l.asp?1565923081

_________________________________________

READERS WRITE

After reading the article "Show Me the Menu," Michael C. Coleman wrote:

Another trick for viewing the full menu is to double-click the menu headings.

Terri Svilar wrote:

My question has to do with publishing a document created in Word that contains color. Is there a way to separate the color from the text? I work at a small community college, and every semester we publish a course schedule. Most of the text is not highlighted, but there are certain entries that are highlighted with a light yellow so that students can easily find them.

It takes the person who gets this ready to be sent to the publisher a considerable amount of time to convert from Word to a format the printers can use. What takes her the most time is the highlighting, and then sometimes the highlighting doesn't match the printed words.

I responded:

The best way to approach this, in my opinion, is to use character styles to format the words that need to be in color. If you don't know about character styles, Word's Help file will tell you about them. You could create a character style named something like "Highlight" and apply it to the words in question. Then, when the file goes to the printer, it can be imported into QuarkXPress (or some other typesetting program), and the character styles can be formatted in color as needed in the typesetting program.

If your files currently use Word's built-in highlighting rather than character styles, you can use Word's Find and Replace feature to find highlighting and replace it with your character style.

Many thanks to Michael and Terri for their messages.

_________________________________________

RESOURCES

A few weeks ago this newsletter included a notice for a presentation by expert word whacker Hilary Powers to the Bay Area Editors' Forum. The notes and tipsheet for the presentation, "Electronic Editing: With Your Computer, Not Just On It," are now available online here:

http://www.editorsforum.org

Click "Forum Index" (on the right) and "Work Support & Tools (on the left)," and you'll see the titles in the alphabetical list (in the middle).

Don't miss this incredible resource! Hilary really knows her stuff, and the notes and tipsheet include tons of truly useful information that can save you hours of work and frustration.

While you're there, check out the other resources and articles available from the Bay Area Editors' Forum.

From Word 2K to 2003 Part 1–Looking up the Mountain

[Editor's note: This week marks the first installment in a series of reports by Word expert Steve Hudson on Word 2003--installation, features, and much, much more. If you're thinking of upgrading, you won't want to miss it. Next week, we'll return to our regularly scheduled feature articles and include the rest of Steve's installments in his own column as they become available. Many thanks to Steve for making them available!]

I've got a stack of research to do on using all these new Word objects (that's "features," for those who don't understand VBA-speak) that have started appearing so we've all got some idea of what's there. So I organised a free copy of Office 2003 to review. When I say free, I do NOT mean pirated--being a Word guru occasionally has a few tiny advantages.

I thought I could knock this article over in a few days. Fortunately for us, unfortunately for the article, there is a lot of new stuff available. So this is going to be a multi-part series for a little while to come. These articles do NOT go into using the new features all that much; it is more meant to give an overview of the changes to expect and help prepare you for the different ways you can work, or not, in Word 2003.

Installation

Before you can play, you have to build the ballpark. So we spent hours installing the suite of Office products I use or require. The much-anticipated "perfect install" was far from that.

First problem was it does not upgrade Outlook 2000, nor allow its dual existence with Outlook 2003. We stupidly believed the dialog and thought it would be OK to continue with the other stuff--but the install went belly up fairly quickly. Shutdown restart just to be sure to be sure. Back up Outlook PST's just in case of splat or regression. Removed Outlook and reran the install of the Office core components--Word, Excel, Outlook, Access, PowerPoint, InfoPath and Publisher all come bundled in tightly together. This worked OK.

To be specific, we only asked to keep the old Word 2000 and delete the rest of the old components.

Components

Visio, OneNote and FrontPage all came separately. The new 2003 Outlook features are pretty good, but it's a bit cluttered and reduces the number of messages on screen at once so you have to scroll around more to find stuff. The blurb annoyingly refers to this in the opposite, "Less scrolling with our new Bulldust!" Installing the patches took a fair while--there are quite a few already. Everything worked as planned, and the Office Update site provided the last, only four days old, patch. Started up the different products--you only have to load one from the core set, not each one--and their online activation with the supplied serials worked like a treat--quick, automatic and seamless.

OneNote is quite cool, a post-it note manager with some extra cool features--it is way more than Outlook's notes. I am sure it will creep into the workflow for many users, being more than a clipboard but less than a Word document. But that's enough about Office--these articles are about Word!

Plug-ins

I found a few add-ins available on the Office site already for Word 2003--a remove metadata tool--don't know how far this goes, but it does address some common, difficult metadata problems--and a smart tag add-in for dates and phone numbers.

Duelling versions--but both die at once

The dual running of Word 2000 and 2003 is already painful--the office installer almost re-installs each one when you open a new session. Spell "wait state" for me please. However, do note that I AM currently running both versions at the same time even, with NO problems or conflicts. A huge step forward. As I tend to load up a Word session for many hours, I can live with that. Also, if you don't load the other version in between sessions, the 're-install' doesn't trigger. WHEW!

The only down side I discovered is cascading failure. Crash one Word session, the other comes tumbling down as well. This could be limited to the type of crash, can't tell as yet. It was incredibly satisfying seeing each error report actually loading with Microsoft rather than the quick "OK, we already know about this one" response. Yet again, I manage to stuff things up in new and amazing ways--the power of the guru!

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READERS WRITE

Melissa L. Bogen wrote:

For one client, I have to insert coded text at the top of each file. I want to write a macro (or find some other fast way) to add this big chunk of text. Up until now I have been copying and pasting the chunk of text from an old manuscript and updating it for the ms being edited. I think automating this step will speed things up. I'd like to write a macro that will go to the top of a file and insert the copy. Then using your MultiMacro program, I can run that macro along with some other macros I've written.

I'm a tad rusty on recording macros. I tried to write a macro that searched for a character string (this client always inserts the same character string at the top of every file) and replaced it with the desired basic chunk of text. However, I crashed Word twice now. Maybe MS Word doesn't like that the "insert what" field in my search and replace that I tried to run while recording the macro had a lot of "^p" for hard returns. (The chunk of text includes about 8 lines of text.)

Can you point me to a place where I can find a solution to adding a chunk of text to the top of every file?

I responded:

The number of times you use ^p shouldn't matter. The ^p code should work fine.

Are you really writing the macro, or just recording it? If you're just recording it, you should be able to:

1. Go to start of document (CTRL + HOME). 2. Replace [character string] with [your chunk of text] (CTRL + H).

And then run the macro.

But that reminds me: The longest chunk of text you can have in the Replace With box is 255 characters. So if your chunk of text is longer than that, that could be the problem.

The sneaky way around this is to:

1. Select and copy the chunk of text to the Clipboard. 2. Find [character string]. 3. Replace with ^c (which is the magic code for "whatever is on the Clipboard."

Melissa replied:

Yup, the chunk of text is long. I tried your sneaky way around it (recorded that as a macro) and it worked great. So now I have a macro, but there needs to be something on the clipboard for it to work. Thus I also saved the chunk of text as AutoText, using Brad Hurley's instructions you provided in this week's newsletter. Now I can insert the AutoText into one document, highlight the inserted boilerplate and hit Ctrl + c to add the boilerplate to the clipboard, then run the macro with a bunch of others using your MultiMacro. All the files in a folder have the text inserted.

Many thanks to Melissa for her questions and tips.

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RESOURCES

Want to see Microsoft's overview of Word 2003? You'll find the official party line here:

http://www.microsoft.com/office/word/prodinfo/default.mspx

Show Me the Menu!

In the 1996 film Jerry McGuire, Tom Cruise shouts "Show me the money!" I know the feeling, but right now I want Microsoft Word to show me the *menu*--all of it! In Word's default state, many menu items are hidden until you click the little arrows at the bottom of a menu. For example, if I click the Format menu, only five items show up. If I click the little arrows down south, I get about four times that many. I'm really tired of having Microsoft decide what I can and can't see. If you are too, here's how to remedy the situation:

1. Click Tools > Customize. (If you can't see "Customize," try clicking the little arrows at the bottom of the menu. Heh.)

2. Click the Options tab.

3. See that check in the checkbox labeled "Menus show recently used commands first"? Get rid of it.

4. Click the OK button.

Now when you click on a menu at the top of your Word window, you'll see all of the menu items it contains.

Of course, Microsoft Word includes many more commands that aren't on *any* menu. You can learn more about that here:

http://lists.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1707791786

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READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article on inserting boilerplate text, Mary L. Tod wrote:

How is the use of a boilerplate file with bookmarks different from or better than using Word's built-in AutoText feature?

I responded:

Good question. It's different in that the entries aren't stored in a template but in a specific document. But is that an advantage over AutoText? Probably not. Is it better than AutoText? Probably not, since with AutoText you can pick and choose the entries you want to insert. However, it is one more item to include in your bag of tricks, and sometime it may come in handy, which is why I thought it might be worth mentioning in the newsletter.

David King also wrote to suggest using AutoText:

The boilerplate article is a nice trick to get text inserted. What I use often is the auto insert feature which when attached to the normal template is always available. Or you can select a template to store it. I do not know how much text it can hold, but the nice feature is you have the option of storing formatting information by including the paragraph mark.

Brad Hurley wrote:

I use AutoText to insert boilerplate, it's very fast and efficient.

First I type the boilerplate in a Word document and select the text.

Then, with the text selected, I go to Insert > AutoText > New

I give the entry an easy-to-remember and descriptive name, like "disclaimer."

From then on, whenever I start to type the word "disclaimer" in a document, Auto-Text pops up and suggests the boilerplate text; to insert the whole shebang all I have to do is hit the Enter key.

If I have a lot of different boilerplates for different purposes and can't remember all their names, I can quickly find and select the right one by going to Insert > AutoText and reviewing the entries in the menu. It stores any entries you've created according to the style of the original text. So if you were using Normal style when you created the boilerplate text, you'll find your AutoText entry in the Insert > AutoText menu under "Normal."

Many thanks to Mary, David, and Brad for their messages.

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RESOURCES

Microsoft Word MVP Shauna Kelly provides particularly lucid and helpful explanations of Word and its features on her Web site, "Making the Most of Word in Your Business":

http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/index.html

She has a number of articles for beginners, along with terrific discussions about styles and formatting; sharing documents; and numbering, bullets, headings, and outlines.

Check it out! You'll be glad you did.

Insert Boilerplate

Boilerplate is text you can use over and over again as needed. For example, the Fine Print section of this newsletter is boilerplate. Here's a little-known but useful way to create boilerplate in Microsoft Word:

1. Create a new document to hold all of your boilerplate text.

2. Paste your boilerplate text into it (obviously enough).

3. Select each chunk of boilerplate text and apply a bookmark to it (Insert > Bookmark). Make the bookmark names short and easy to remember. You may even want to keep a list of the bookmarks for reference. (You'll see why in just a minute.)

4. Save your document with a name like "Boilerplate" in an easy-to-find folder.

Now, when you're working on some document and want to insert some boilerplate text, here's what to do:

1. Click Insert > File.

2. Navigate to your Boilerplate file and click it.

3. Click the "Range" button.

4. Enter the name of the bookmark for the chunk of boilerplate you want to use. Unfortunately, Word won't give you a dropdown list of the bookmarks, which is why you should use short, memorable bookmark names and keep a list of what they are.

5. Click the "Insert" button.

The boilerplate for the bookmark you entered will be inserted into your document.

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READERS WRITE

Answering the question "How many pages per hour should someone be able to edit on-screen?" expert word-whacker Hilary Powers wrote:

"Should" is a hard word to apply, as the work varies so much according to the condition of the manuscript and the skills of the editor. But one thing I can say: pages-per-hour production should not be lower than the equivalent paper speed.

For the purposes of pricing, paper speed expectations remain the standard, much as 250 words remains the standard page decades after the demise of the 10-pitch typewriter.

For doing the work, I find that I'm reliably between 150% and 300% of the paper speed expectations--but I've been counting keystrokes and squeezing electrons till they scream for ten years now. It'd be a very reasonable first goal to try to match paper speed on-screen--without rushing. Rather, look for ways to get the effects you want as easily as possible . . . and keep looking after you get back to your paper level, as by that point you'll probably have no more than scratched the surface of what's possible.

A job I finished a bit ago--a near-300-page manuscript in very good shape, well written and with a charming subject--had a net thruput of 14.5 pages per hour. That's close to the top I've achieved thus far for straight editing, but not the absolute max if memory serves.

------------------------

Hilary also wrote:

Here's another wrinkle on the title-case macro:


Sub SentenceTitle()
' Macro written 3/20/2004 by Hilary Powers
Selection.Range.Case = wdLowerCase
Selection.MoveLeft Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=1
Selection.Find.ClearFormatting
With Selection.Find
.text = ":"
End With
Selection.Find.Execute
Selection.MoveRight Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=2
Selection.Range.Case = wdNextCase
End Sub

It's for converting two-part title-case titles to sentence case: Select everything but the first word and hit the hot key, and it all goes lowercase except the word following the colon. . . . A godsend for a 50-page reference list with mixed formatting that needs to go to APA. (A refined version would let you select the whole title and then uppercase both the first word and the word after the colon, but I got lazy.)

If you don't know how to use macros like that one, you can find out here:

Many thanks to Hilary for her terrific tips.

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RESOURCES

Where does the term "boilerplate" come from? You can find out at World Wide Words and The Word Detective, both wonderful sites for those interested in words:

http://www.quinion.com/words/index.php

http://www.word-detective.com/index.html

Object Browser

Have you ever wished you had a way to move quickly from one footnote to the next in Word? How about from one edit to the next? One heading to the next? If so, you need to know about Word's Object Browser, which is poorly documented but richly useful.

The Object Browser lives at the bottom of the scroll bar on the right side of your Word window. It consists of three buttons, which look something like this:

o
v

There's a double up-arrow on top, a small round button in the middle, and a double down-arrow on the bottom. The arrows take you to the next or previous something, and the button in the middle lets you pick what that something will be. Just click it to see and select the various options, which include:

* Go To

* Find

* Edit

* Heading

* Graphic

* Table

* Field

* Endnote

* Footnote

* Comment

* Section

* Page

That's a lot of stuff! Note that Go To will take you to whatever you've selected in Word's Go To feature, which you can summon up by clicking the Go To button in the Object Browser (or by pressing CTRL + G). And that means you can add the following items to the list of things you can browse:

* Line

* Bookmark (selectable)

* Comment (selectable by reviewer)

* Field (selectable)

* Equation

* Object (selectable)

Similarly, the Find button will open the Find dialog, allowing you to search your document as usual. But after you've found the first instance of the thing you're searching for, you can use the Object Browser to jump to the next one. And the next one. And the previous one. Whatever.

This would really be slick if we just had some keyboard shortcuts to do our browsing instead of having to click those tiny buttons. Well, okay, the shortcuts are CTRL + PAGE DOWN and CTRL + PAGE UP. Enjoy!

Thanks to Meg Cox for suggesting this topic.

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READERS WRITE

After reading last week's article on displaying pages two up, Julian Jenkins wrote:

Thanks for this advice. I now have the multiple pages button on my Formatting toolbar as suggested. However, the same thing can be achieved by selecting "Two Pages" on the zoom menu (underneath the various choices of percentages to zoom to).

------------------------------

Aaron Shepard wrote:

If you select "Different Odd and Even Headers and Footers," Word will show odd pages on the right under Print Preview. In Word 98 for Mac, I'm going to Format > Document > Layout. Click "Different Odd and Even" and apply to whole document. I think I first used it with Word 2001 for the Mac, but I'm not sure. On the PC, it's under File > Page Setup.

Word 98 doesn't have the option on the zoom menu. Simply choosing a small percentage for zoom does bring up multiple pages, but there's a difference. If I use the Multiple Pages button, the pages automatically expand to fit the window. That doesn't happen with the zoom setting.

------------------------------

Donald Hawkins wrote:

I liked your idea of showing pages two-up as described in the latest issue of your newsletter. You might mention that even after you copy the Multiple Pages button to another toolbar, there's an extra step to getting two-up pages. You still have to pick the configuration you want (1x2 pages, 1x3, etc.)--it doesn't go directly to the 2 page display. And when you're done and want to go back to normal view, you have to adjust the zoom back to 100%. (On my screen, print preview comes up at 49% zoom.)

------------------------------

Chuck Tucker wrote:

I suggest a much simpler way to display pages Two Up. When I want to see two pages side by side in Word I simply hold the Ctrl key down and rotate the wheel on the mouse until I see two pages (or 3 or 4 or whatever) side by side. I can easily edit either page, move to other pages, etc. All I have done is change the zoom factor, and I don't need to go to Print Preview to do it.

I would also mention that in Word 2003 they have added a new feature under the View menu called "Reading Layout" that automatically generates a Two Up display with side-by-side views of the pages. There is also an associated Toolbar. You can change the zoom factor in this view and it remains two side-by-side pages. You can perform all usual edits on the pages. Scrolling down brings up the next two pages, etc. This feature is tied in with the Reviewing capabilities of Word--something I haven't pursued in any detail yet, but it looks like more reviewing features than were present in earlier versions.

Many thanks to all for their terrific tips.

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RESOURCES

If you're just getting started in Microsoft Word, you may appreciate the basic Word tutorials at Electric Teacher:

http://www.electricteacher.com/tutorials.htm

Two Up

As a book editor, I often want to see the pages of a book I'm working on as "two up"--that is, two pages at a time, side by side on my screen. This is easily done in Print Preview, of course:

1. Click "File > Print Preview."

2. Click the "Multiple Pages" button--it's green and has four little pages on it.

3. On the little menu that pops up, point your mouse at the second of the first two pages, displaying the notation "1 X 2 Pages" at the bottom of the menu.

4. Click that second page.

Now two side-by side pages should be displayed on your screen.

You can actually work on these pages by clicking the Magnifier button (a toggle) on the Print Preview toolbar (second button from the left). Working in Print Preview always seems kind of clunky to me, however. So I've set up Word to display multiple pages in regular old Print Layout view (View > Print Layout):

1. Click "File > Print Preview."

2. Right-click the Print Preview toolbar and click "Customize."

3. Hold down the CTRL key (to copy rather than move) and drag the Multiple Pages button to a different toolbar--the Formatting toolbar should do nicely.

4. Click the Close button.

Now you have a copy of the Multiple Pages button on your Formatting toolbar. Click it, as explained above, to display pages two up. Pretty slick!

There's just one problem: Word displays those two pages with the odd page on the left and the even page on the right--exactly the opposite of what you'd see in a printed book. It's a little confusing, if you ask me. The workaround is to create a blank section page at the beginning of your document and number it as page 0. Here's how:

1. Place your cursor at the very top of your document (CTRL + HOME).

2. Click "Insert > Break."

3. Under "Section break types," click "Odd page."

4. Click the OK button.

5. Click "Insert > Page Numbers."

6. Click the Format button.

7. Under "Page numbering," click "Start at."

8. In the "Start at" box, enter a zero.

9. Click the OK button.

10. Click the Close button.

Now when you display pages two up, you'll see odd pages on the right, where they belong.

I don't recommend showing pages two up while *editing* a document, but for page layout or overall document review, it's tough to beat. Just page down, review your pages, page down, review your pages, tweaking and refining as you go. I'm still amazed that it's possible to do this in good old Microsoft Word.

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RESOURCES

The FontSite offers great fonts, and a number of them are free. As the site says, "The following fonts are available for a limited time at 100% off the regular price. Check back regularly as we plan to offer other typefaces and type-related shareware programs and utilities we believe should be part of one's typographic toolkit."

http://www.fontsite.com/Pages/FFDownloads.html