Category Archives: Editing

Last week’s newsletter provided a style sheet that editors can use to keep track of style decisions while editing in Microsoft Word. If you didn’t get that style sheet, you can download it here: http://www.editorium.com/ftp/stylesheet.zip Hilary Powers was kind enough to provide her StyleThat macro in last week’s newsletter, and this week I’ve adapted that […]

Boilerplate is text you can use over and over again as needed. For example, the Fine Print section of this newsletter is boilerplate. Here’s a little-known but useful way to create boilerplate in Microsoft Word: 1. Create a new document to hold all of your boilerplate text. 2. Paste your boilerplate text into it (obviously […]

Have you ever wished you had a way to move quickly from one footnote to the next in Word? How about from one edit to the next? One heading to the next? If so, you need to know about Word’s Object Browser, which is poorly documented but richly useful. The Object Browser lives at the […]

As a book editor, I often want to see the pages of a book I’m working on as “two up”–that is, two pages at a time, side by side on my screen. This is easily done in Print Preview, of course: 1. Click “File > Print Preview.” 2. Click the “Multiple Pages” button–it’s green and […]

I recently noticed that one of my colleagues, a fellow editor, was reading a document set in 10-point type, with the lines running all the way across his giant 21-inch monitor. He was having a terrible time “tracking” from the end of one line to the beginning of the next, and he was squinting, bending […]

I’ve been asked by several readers if there’s a way to convert Word comments (Insert > Comment) to document text. It depends on what “convert” means. If you just need to get the text of a bunch of comments, you can open the Comments pane (View > Comments), select all, copy, and then paste to […]

Microsoft Word’s AutoText feature provides an easy way to store and then reuse text, graphics, fields, tables, bookmarks, and other items. For example, this newsletter includes the same “Fine Print” section every week. All I have to do is save that text as an AutoText entry, and I can easily insert it in the newsletter […]

I’m often faced with the task of creating a bibliography for a book I’m editing, but I hate typing in all those entries from scratch. Lazy fellow that I am, I’ve figured out an automated way to turn parenthetical notes into bibliography entries. It’s longish, but it sure beats doing it by hand. You may […]

Many of the books I edit in Word are loaded with footnotes, and I’ve often wished I had a way to see notes and text at the same time while scrolling through them independently. Comes the dawn! It’s easy: 1. Open your footnote-laden document. 2. Make sure you’re looking at the document in Normal view […]

The newsletter a couple of weeks ago featured a macro that would set all headings in a Word document in true title case, with articles and prepositions lowercased. But what if you have a document in which an author has typed other stuff in all caps–author names in footnotes, or book titles in body text? […]