Category Archives: Editing Tools

Add-Ins from Microsoft

By Jack Lyon | Published: June 15, 2023

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium I’ve created lots of Microsoft Word add-ins at the Editorium, but did you know that Microsoft also provides add-ins, many of them free? Here’s how to explore and use these add-ins right from within Microsoft Word. In the search bar at the top of your Word window, enter “add-in.” You’ll […]

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Edit First, Check Later

By Jack Lyon | Published: March 15, 2023

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium The world is awash with software designed to improve your writing, and this software can be particularly valuable to editors. Here are some of the current contenders: PerfectIt from IntelligentEditing Lingofy Scribendi ProWritingAid WordTune Hemingway WhiteSmoke Ginger Sapling SlickWrite LanguageTool SentenceCheckup Linguix AfterTheDeadline OnlineCorrection Antidote GrammarCheck But good grief, how […]

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Getting a Bird’s-Eye View on Your Document

By Jack Lyon | Published: December 16, 2022

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium Back in the days of editing on paper, I would sometimes spread manuscript pages out on my desk to get a bird’s-eye view of the text I was working on. This could be useful for several reasons: To see if long stretches of text needed to be broken down into […]

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Listing Keyboard Shortcuts: Two Methods

By Jack Lyon | Published: November 3, 2022

By Jack Lyon, the Editorium As useful as custom keyboard shortcuts may be in using Microsoft Word, it’s sometimes difficult to remember which keys you’ve assigned to what function. Word itself includes one way to find out: Click File > Print. Under "Settings," select "Key Assignments: List of your custom shortcut keys": Select the printer […]

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Review: Geoff Hart’s Effective Onscreen Editing, 3rd Edition

By Jack Lyon | Published: October 6, 2016

Back in 2007, I reviewed the first edition of Geoff Hart’s book Effective Onscreen Editing, which I still keep close at hand on my bookshelf. Why? Because it’s one of the best books ever written about how to edit on a computer, packed with real-world information you’ll find nowhere else. My own books (such as […]

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Lyonizing Word: Before Typesetting

By americaneditor | Published: August 22, 2016

by Jack Lyon I need your help, Gentle Reader. I need your ideas. Back in 1996, when I started selling Microsoft Word add-ins at the Editorium, getting a Word document into QuarkXPress was tricky: Quark was prone to crashes and didn’t handle footnotes at all. To solve these problems, I created QuarkConverter, and NoteStripper. A few […]

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Lyonizing Word: Inside Notes

By americaneditor | Published: July 18, 2016

by Jack Lyon As useful as they are, Microsoft Word’s footnotes and endnotes are amazingly easy to mess up. Let’s look at some ways that can happen — and how to fix the problems. First, we need to open a document that has footnotes — or make one. Then, to really see what’s going on, […]

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Lyonizing Word: But Which Styles?

By americaneditor | Published: March 21, 2016

Which paragraph styles do you want to use? If you’re writing a simple business letter, the only style you may need is Word’s default of Normal. But if you’re editing a book, things immediately become much more complicated. Consider: What different kinds of text exist in a book?

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Lyonizing Word: Taming Styles in Microsoft Word

By americaneditor | Published: February 29, 2016

Styles are very useful. The problem is that Microsoft Word, in its usual “helpful” way, tries to manage which styles are available, in which document, and how those styles can be accessed. Finally growing tired of this nonsense, I decided to take the matter firmly in hand by writing this article, with the intent to solve the problems as I do so.

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Lyonizing Word: Why Computers?

By americaneditor | Published: November 18, 2015

by Jack Lyon Dan A. Wilson, of The Editor’s Desktop, once advised editors that a computer is “far and away your most valuable tool, your ultimate enabler, your brain’s second-in-command. A brain with a pencil in its hand cannot compete — indeed, cannot even credibly challenge — a brain with a computer and computer-sophistication at […]

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