Author Archives: Jack Lyon

Last week’s newsletter featured a macro to change all-cap headings into title case. It had some drawbacks, though. It would do only one heading level at a time, and you had to specify which heading level you wanted it to work on. In addition, it didn’t lowercase articles, prepositions, and conjunctions. What’s really needed is […]

During my other life as a copyeditor, I often find myself needing to change the case of words that an author has typed in all caps, LIKE THIS, in chapter titles and subheads. I often perform the task with the handy Cap Title Case feature in my Editor’s ToolKit program, but I’ve also wished for […]

Do you ever need to change your keyboard layout from one language to another? If so, you’ve undoubtedly noticed that your English-language keyboard doesn’t always match the keyboard layout used by your computer. If this drives you crazy, you’ll be happy to know about Microsoft’s Visual Keyboard add-in for Word 2000 and 2002. Visual Keyboard […]

Word 2002 and Word 2003 include a long-awaited feature: the Style Separator. The Style Separator is a special, hidden (and undocumented) paragraph mark. Rather than creating a paragraph *break,* however, it marks the spot where one paragraph style ends and another paragraph style begins–*all in the same paragraph.* That’s right–starting with Word 2002, you can […]

Ever find yourself needing to convert a Word document into PDF (Portable Document Format)? Adobe Acrobat, the program usually used to create PDF documents, is fairly expensive, so you may be interested in some cheaper or even free alternatives: The free OpenOffice.org software is made specifically to work with Microsoft Word documents, and it allows […]

If you’ve read many past issues of this newsletter, you know that I loathe Word’s AutoFormat options, although I do use one of them–“Replace straight quotes with smart quotes.” But sometimes, no matter how hard I try, I can’t insert a quotation mark going the right direction. If I want a closing quotation mark, Word […]

Recently a colleague said to me, “Look at this manuscript. All the ordinal numbers are superscripted.” What he meant was that “1st,” “2nd,” “3rd,” and so on had the “st,” “nd,” and “rd” in superscript. Then came an interesting question: “Do you think I should leave them that way?” Now, I don’t know about you, […]

[Editor’s note: This week’s feature article comes from Dan A. Wilson, a true gentleman and an editor’s editor. Dan explains how to modify even the *built-in* buttons on Word’s “My Places” toolbar. Don’t want a “Desktop” button getting in your way? Dan explains how to remove it–and much more. I really appreciate Dan’s generosity in […]

This week I’ve been editing a new project in Microsoft Word and decided to try something new–editing in Print Layout in Full-Screen mode. I didn’t think I’d like it, but I do–a lot. If you want to try it, you can activate the feature by adjusting some items under the View menu, in this order: […]