Tips for Publishing Professionals Using Microsoft Word (www.editorium.com)
In my last few years as a corporate employee, I felt compelled to edit faster and faster while still maintaining accuracy. (Could it have had something to do with the many rounds of layoffs in the company?) If you’re feeling the same squeeze, I have some suggestions that might help.
Word 2008, for Macintosh, isn’t out yet but will be later this year:
http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2007/jan07/01-09MacworldPR.ms px
Here it is, 2007 already. So it seems appropriate to look at Word 2007 and see if it’s something editors and other publishing professionals might find useful. You’ll find Microsoft’s sales pitch here:
I’ve recently needed to help several people convert Microsoft Word text boxes to text. Is there something in the wind? Whatever is going on, if you’re having to copy and paste, copy and paste, to get that text out where you can use it, you’ll appreciate the following macro, which pulls text-box text out as regular text and styles it with a character style named “OnceABox,” colored red for easy identification. To (eventually) get rid of the red, just delete the character style. (Thanks to Geoff Hart, David Chinell, and Janna DeVore for inspiration.)
In our last episode, I provided a macro to make a list of misspelled words found in a document. You’ll find the macro here:
I’ve been working on a really big set of really big books that use odd, archaic spellings. Wanting to modernize those spellings, I decided to create a macro that would list every word that Microsoft Word sees as misspelled. You’ll find the macro a little farther down, but before using it, you’ll need to tell the macro where the misspellings are to be recorded. There are three options:
Back in January 2003 I published an article called “WordPerfect Weirdness,” which featured a macro for converting “special” characters (dashes, quotation marks, and the like) in a file imported from WordPerfect to Word. You can read the article here:
When I was in first grade, a magician came to our school, and I’ve been interested in magic ever since. One thing I’ve learned is that magic is largely psychological; it depends heavily on what magicians call “misdirection”–getting the audience to look at or think about something that furthers the magician’s deception.
I’m constantly having to clean up files from authors. Most of them have no clue about how a manuscript should be structured or formatted. That’s why I’ve created an Author Tools template–to help authors write, structure, and format their manuscripts in an easy, consistent way. (And, of course, to simplify my life–and possibly yours.) You can download the template (at no charge)–along with complete instructions for using it–here:
Microsoft Word, in a broad sense, has two kinds of section breaks (Insert > Break):
1. The kind that starts a new page (which includes “Next page,” “Even page,” and “Odd page).