Category Archives: Editing

[Last week’s newsletter featured an article on British and American spelling. Thank goodness a reader who actually knows about such things sent some corrections. Please see the Readers Write column (below the main article) for details. I’ll postpone my article on British to American translation (bonnet/hood) until I’ve verified my list with more than just […]

Have you ever needed to change spelling from British English to American English or vice versa? One way to do this is to change the language format of your Word document and then do a spell check. For example, if you needed to change spelling from British to American, you could change the language format […]

Part of my editing process is applying paragraph styles (like Heading 1) to a manuscript. As I’ve done this, I’ve noticed an annoying bug: Applying the paragraph style often makes character formatting (such as italics) disappear. You can see this for yourself: 1. Create a new document in Word 6, 95, 97, 98, 2000, or […]

If you often use wildcards with Microsoft Word’s Find and Replace feature, you probably know that Word won’t let you specify “Find whole words only” when the “Use wildcards” option is checked. This is more than an annoyance; sometimes you really *need* to be able to find whole words only while searching with wildcards. To […]

You’ve just sent a freshly edited manuscript back to your client, but you decide to glance through it one last time. Acck! What’s this? “Our company has been highly visible in the pubic arena . . .” How did *that* get through? It got through because you don’t have an exclude dictionary in Microsoft Word. […]

If you haven’t yet read the New York Times editorial by Mark Goldblatt on the bowdlerization of Microsoft Word’s thesaurus, you owe it to yourself to do so. You can read the piece here: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/10/23/opinion/23GOLD.html (You may need to register in order to read the article. But it’s free!) Goldblatt chronicles his discovery that Microsoft […]

Last week’s newsletter featured a macro (Go2Text) designed to take you to specified text without using cursor keys or the mouse. You can learn about it here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708547575 A couple of readers have asked (much more nicely than this), “Why the heck should I use Go2Text when Word’s Find feature will do the same thing?” […]

When I’m editing in Word and see something I want to correct, I usually have to use the cursor keys (repeatedly) to get to it, or I have to reach for the mouse to select it. I finally got tired of both alternatives and created a macro called Go2Text, which instantly takes you to the […]

Microsoft Word guru Steve Hudson has been sending me some interesting things. Today I’d like to introduce you to his “Editioning” macro, which allows you to use true conditional text in Microsoft Word 97 and above. Conditional text is the thing to use if you need to change a document in different ways for different […]

Over the past few weeks we’ve discussed corrections that editors can make automatically with Microsoft Word’s Find and Replace feature. For more information, see these three issues of Editorium Update: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708048908 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708127357 http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1708293844 In addition, editors can save time by making “semiautomatic” corrections–in other words, by using Word’s Find feature to locate “indicators” of possible […]