Category Archives: Contributor Article

Lyonizing Word: Assigning Macro Shortcut Keys

By americaneditor | Published: August 31, 2015

Learning how to assign keyboard combinations to macros may seem like a small thing, but small things add up to greater editing efficiency, and that means more money in your pocket and less time at work, both of which are big things.

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Lyonizing Word: From Easy to Impossible — Three Variations on a Theme

By americaneditor | Published: July 20, 2015

Wildcard searching can’t do everything, but it can do an awful lot. As I’ve said before, after all these years of editing, wildcard searching is the tool I rely on the most. I encourage you to invest the time needed to learn to use this tool, which will repay your efforts many times over.

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Lyonizing Word: The Easy Way, Not So Easy

By americaneditor | Published: June 29, 2015

by Jack Lyon After publishing my last article, Lyonizing Word: We Can Do This the Easy Way, or . . ., Rich Adin, An American Editor, wrote: As written, your wildcard find and replace reduces four names to three if “et al:” is the ending characteristic. How do you write it so that it can handle any […]

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Lyonizing Word: We Can Do This the Easy Way, or . . .

By americaneditor | Published: May 27, 2015

We Can Do This the Easy Way, or We Can Do This the Hard Way by Jack Lyon American Editor Rich Adin called me recently with a puzzle. He was editing a list of citations that looked like this: Lyon J, Adin R, Poole L, Brenner E, et al: blah blah blah. But his client […]

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Lyonizing Word: Shifting Styles

By americaneditor | Published: April 27, 2015

The whole issue with all of these Word style problems is one of control. How much “help” do you want Microsoft Word to give you? If you’re editing, your answer may be “none,” because editors need to have complete control over what’s happening, and they can’t have Word introducing changes they may not even be aware of. When I’m editing, I disable all of these features. If you’ve been suffering from the madness of shifting styles, maybe you’ll want to do the same.

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Lyonizing Word: The Right Tool for the Job

By americaneditor | Published: January 28, 2015

Using the right tool can make editing faster, more accurate, and more profitable.

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Lyonizing Word: Finding and Replacing Upper- and Lowercase

By americaneditor | Published: December 29, 2014

Finding and Replacing Upper- and Lowercase by Jack Lyon Rich Adin, the proprietor of this blog, recently sent me an interesting question. He wrote: I need a wildcard find and replace, assuming it can be done by wildcards, that searches for the following Abrams: alpha booby: alarm and replaces it with Abrams: Alpha booby: Alarm […]

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Lyonizing Word: Formatting with Macros

By americaneditor | Published: November 12, 2014

Formatting with Macros by Jack Lyon Most users of Microsoft Word format text by selecting a paragraph and then applying a font. More advanced users apply a style. Here’s why: Styles are easier to use than direct formatting. Once you have the style set up (with, say, 12-point Arial bold, condensed by 1 point, left […]

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Lyonizing Word: Deleting Extraneous Carriage Returns in Footnotes and Endnotes

By americaneditor | Published: March 31, 2014

One mistake authors make is to insert extraneous carriage returns before or after a note. Why? Because they don’t like the positioning of the note on the page, which they’re trying to make “pretty,” not understanding the problems that will cause in editing and typesetting.

Also posted in Computers and Software, Editorial Matters, Guest Article, Lyonizing Word | Tagged , , | 6 Responses

Lyonizing Word: The Next Character Macro

By americaneditor | Published: March 3, 2014

Macros and mastering Microsoft Word are keys to success in the business of editing. One can be a great editor and not master either, but it is more difficult, if not near-impossible, to have a successful editing business if you aren’t master of the tools you use.

Also posted in Computers and Software, Editing Tools, Lyonizing Word | Tagged , , , | 4 Responses