Category Archives: Editing

As you’ve edited various manuscripts, you’ve probably noticed the propensity of some authors to type headings in all caps, as I’ve done with the title of this article. This holdover from the days of typewriting is, to put it bluntly, bad practice. Why? Because in typesetting or desktop publishing, putting a heading in all caps […]

After reading our last newsletter, subscriber Debby English wrote: “In your latest issue, ‘Creating New Documents,’ you mentioned that you have modified Word’s built-in invoice template. I would like to do the same but cannot find it in my Word template directory. Can you give me a clue about where it might be and what […]

In our past few newsletters, we’ve been talking about templates–attaching them, creating them, and so on. There’s still one area we haven’t talked about: creating *new* documents based on existing templates. If you’re an editor, you may be thinking, “I usually work on documents someone else has created.” True enough. However, as an editor you […]

It’s midnight at the publishing house. All the cubicles are dark–except one in the back corner, where a frazzled production editor struggles to finish formatting a 700-page book that’s due at press in eight short hours. Can’t we do something to help? As we’ve seen in our newsletters the past few weeks, Microsoft Word documents […]

Microsoft Word comes with several templates for creating reports, press releases, resumes, and other documents. These templates can come in handy, but, as subscriber David Ibbetson writes, “The best way to use templates is to make your own according to your tastes and needs. Built-in templates can be valuable as a source of ideas, and […]

Last week we used Microsoft Word’s Style Gallery to understand one of the main reasons for using templates: to change the formatting of all of the styles in a document. You can read last week’s newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1704442036 Why would you want to change the formatting of all of the styles in a document? Let […]

A hundred years ago when I switched from WordPerfect to Microsoft Word, there was one thing I just didn’t understand. That thing was templates. What the heck were they, anyway? How was I supposed to use them? And what did they have to do with editing? Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary defines “template” as a “pattern […]

Here’s the scenario: You open a giant document from a client and start looking through it. But what’s this? The same odd character at the beginning of every paragraph. Must be some kind of file translation error. Odder still, Microsoft Word won’t let you paste the character into its Find and Replace dialog, so how […]

Our last newsletter explained how to search for special characters (such as carriage returns and section breaks) using character codes. You can read the newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?sort=d&mid=1703875043 Why should you, as an editor, writer, or publisher, care about something as “technical” as searching with codes? Because they make it possible to find and replace things […]

In our last newsletter, I explained how to find Microsoft Word footnote numbers using the character code ^02. You can read the newsletter here: http://www.topica.com/lists/editorium/read/message.html?mid=1703696660 There are other character codes you can use to find certain items: * For a carriage return, you can use ^013. * For a section break, you can use ^012. […]