Category Archives: Editing

Last week we discussed using wildcard combinations to find text in a Microsoft Word document. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1706069286 This week we’ll talk about wildcard ranges, which you’ll probably use a lot. Wildcard ranges are fairly simple. You just use the [-] wildcard to tell Microsoft Word what to find. Let’s […]

Last week we discussed the basics of using wildcards to find text in a Microsoft Word document. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705963026 This week we’ll talk about how to combine wildcards, which will let you get pretty fancy about the stuff you want to find. Basically, you just need to know that […]

Subscriber Allene Goforth (agoforth@aros.net) wrote: “I use your ‘Searching with Microsoft Word’s Built-In Codes’ list all the time, but Word’s restrictions on what codes can be used in the ‘Replace with’ box are a pain. I’d love to see an issue of Editorium Update that deals with wildcard searching.” Thanks for the suggestion, Allene. Here […]

Last week I explained how to use Word’s Rand feature to create sample text (“The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”) that you can use for various purposes. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1705763701 I neglected to mention that for the Rand feature to work, “Replace text as you type” must […]

Working in Microsoft Word, I often need some “junk” text to play around with, for various reasons: * I’m designing a document and don’t want to get bogged down in what the text actually says. * I’m creating a template with various paragraph styles and need to see what they will look like. * I’m […]

This week subscriber Doug Clapp, proprietor of PocketPCpress (http://www.pocketpcpress.com/), wrote with an interesting question. He’d received a book that had been typeset in QuarkXPress (Doug didn’t have QuarkXPress) and sent to him as a “stuffed” (.sit) Macintosh file (Doug didn’t have the StuffIt program or a Macintosh). What Doug *needed* was an unstuffed Microsoft Word […]

An important part of editing is marking type specification levels in a manuscript. The Chicago Manual of Style describes the process like this: “Each item in the opening of an article or of a preface, chapter . . . , appendix, or other section of a book (title, chapter number, etc.) is marked for its […]

I finally went out and bought that new monitor I mentioned last week–a 19-inch Sony that looked great in the store (playing the Jurassic Park DVD!). But when I got it home and hooked it up, it didn’t look so good. The characters in Microsoft Word looked jagged, and the toolbar icons were huge! Couldn’t […]

This week I’ve been shopping around for a new monitor. That got me thinking about what editors need in the way of computer equipment. If you work for a corporation, the powers-that-be probably think like this: “Editors just do word-processing, so they don’t need much of a computer.” Then they buy you something cheap and […]

Microsoft Word provides several keyboard shortcuts to help you move around a document, which is important when you’re serious about editing efficiently. You may not know, however, that Word includes commands to move from sentence to sentence–highly useful for an editor! The commands aren’t mentioned in Word’s Help file, and they’re not assigned to any […]