Category Archives: Editing

If you work with tables, you’ve probably wished for a way to automatically swap the contents of two adjacent cells. If so, here’s a macro that will do the trick. Just put your cursor in the first of the two cells you want to transpose and then run the macro. If you don’t know how […]

You probably use your mouse to select text in Word all the time, but did you know you can select vertically as well as horizontally? For example, let’s take the following text as an example: Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.” (James Allen, As a Man Thinketh) You can easily […]

In our shop, we have several editors (who edit books, natch) and a few editorial assistants (who proofread, check corrections, and so on). We edit in Microsoft Word, and most electronic manuscripts require a lot of cleanup. The editors do much of this themselves–turning multiple spaces into single spaces, changing double hyphens into em dashes, […]

In many of the manuscripts I edit, the author has used superscript for ordinal numbers, entering 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (and so on) as 1^st^, 2^nd^, 3^rd^, and 4^th^ (the carets represent superscript here). Why? Because Microsoft Word by default inserts ordinal numbers using superscript–one of its many “helpful” features, which I explain how […]

@Body:You probably think my email program has gone wacko, inserting codes rather than applying formatting. But it hasn’t. I’m just trying the technique described in this article–marking formatting with raw codes. Why would anyone want to do that? Consider this: @ListFirst:1.Text formatting is misleading. It may look nice, but it comes with a price–the sacrifice […]

This week I’ve been editing notes–4,028 of them to be exact. And boy, were they a mess–a garbled collection of inconsistency and error. They looked something like this: Jones, Sunlit Land, 24. Era of Sand, Jan. 1953, 59. Today’s News, April 17, 1965, 3. Jones, Sunlit land, 33. Era of Sandy, January 1953 20. Jones, […]

With some customization, Microsoft Word makes a pretty good tool for editing. The fact that it can be customized, in fact, is one of its finest features. I also like its use of styles, spell-checking, wildcard Find and Replace, and notes. There are also plenty of things I *don’t* like, including Word’s general “bugginess” and […]

In the past, I’ve recommended using your own template to apply to documents you’re editing. This allows you to use a typeface that’s easy to read on your monitor, offers plenty of differentiation between double and single quotation marks, and has a long em dash, a medium-sized en dash, and a short hyphen (so you […]

One of the problems of editing on-screen is that punctuation marks are harder to see than on paper. Is that speck on my screen a period or just spray from my Diet Coke? (Sorry. Didn’t mean to gross you out.) There’s an easy remedy for this–one I like a lot. Just create a character style […]

If you’ve done much editing in Microsoft Word, you’ve probably used Track Changes (Revisions), which marks deleted and added text so you can review (or let someone else review) your editing. If you haven’t used it, here’s how to turn it on: 1. Click the “Tools” menu. 2. Click “Track Changes.” 3. Click “Highlight Changes.” […]