Editorium Update

Out of the box, Microsoft Word is set up for the most generic of users–someone who needs to type an occasional letter or compose a memo for the boss. It works well for such purposes, offering lots of automated corrections and formatting for someone who doesn’t want to think about such things. But for people who work in the publishing industry, Word needs considerable tweaking. For one thing, if you’re editing, typesetting, or indexing in Word, you don’t *want* all that automated stuff; you want *control.* No automatically capitalizing the first word of a sentence, for example, or setting the ends of ordinal numbers (1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th) as superscript.

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Stars, pencils, light bulbs, puppy dogs, faces, diamonds, and hearts. What am I talking about? Toolbar buttons! Lots and lots of toolbar buttons!

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If you record macros to help automate your editing, you’ve probably bumped into a seemingly insurmountable problem: You can get a macro to find something, and then do something, but not more than once. For example, let’s say you want a macro to do this:

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Last week I explained how to create your own toolbars in Microsoft Word. You can create your own menus, too, as a place to activate macros or Word commands. Here’s how:

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A few weeks ago, we talked about how to create toolbar buttons to activate your macros, but the fact is, you can create your own toolbars as well. Then you’re not stuck with the toolbars that come with Microsoft Word. Here’s how:

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In our last newsletter, we talked about putting macros on toolbar buttons, but you may prefer putting them on menus instead. Here’s how:

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If you’ve been recording your own macros (as explained in past issues of Editorium Update), you may be interested in putting them on toolbar buttons for easy access. Here’s how:

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If you’ve been recording your own macros, as explained in our past several newsletters, you’ve probably been saving them in your Normal template, where they’ll be available to use with any document. The Normal template may not be the best place to save them, however. Since it’s used a lot, it can become corrupt. (You should back up your Normal template frequently.) Also, saving macros in your Normal template makes it hard to keep them organized.

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In upcoming issues of Editorium Update, I’ll explain how to run macros by adding your own toolbar buttons, menu items, and keyboard combinations to Microsoft Word. If you want to get a head start, however, be sure to read today’s Readers Write column, where subscriber David M Varner explains the importance of using keyboard combinations (”hot keys”) and how to create them. Thanks, David!

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Over the past few weeks we’ve been talking about recording macros to automate repetitive tasks in Microsoft Word. You can read the newsletters here:

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