In this exercise, you’ll practice applying Styles and using the Outline View.
Heading levels must be indicated in the manuscript in some way. Heads can’t simply be formatted as body text—even boldfacing will help the designer as much as the editor. And the reader absolutely needs them.
Continue reading Try This! Restructure Using StylesQ Is there a way to get out of a Comment without using the mouse?
Esc, ←
A Yes, press Escape! Keeping your hands on the keyboard is the fastest way to work, and the perfect alternative to a mouse that’s lost its juice.
Macros can do some amazing complex and lengthy tasks in just a click, but you don’t need a macro for everything! Here are four things to try before of creating a macro:
Wide tables and infographics are just two reasons you might want to set a particular page to print in the horizontal, landscape orientation. If you’re preparing a manuscript for professional design, doing this only helps you work with the material. And anything the helps your work is worth doing. But if you’re producing, for example, an internal report entirely within Word, adjusting the page orientation to fit the content is vital.
To prevent the entire file from being set in landscape, first insert Section Breaks. Find this function on the Layout ribbon (see figure). There are many uses for Section Breaks; here we’re just using them to confine the orientation to the desired pages. Select simply Break > Section Break, Next Page from the Page Breaks option in the Page Setup group.
Insert a Section Break both before and after the material that should be set in landscape. Then, place the cursor within that section, and select Orientation > Landscape on the Layout ribbon. That’s it!
Section break markers can get effectively hidden at the bottom of a very full page or even at the end of a line that nearly touches the margin. If you suspect a section break may be causing problems, search for them using regular expressions in the Find and Replace function.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
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© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!
Call it a glitch, but if you’re missing the horizontal Reviewing Pane option in MS Word on your Mac, you can turn this glitch into a happy hack!
Create a macro for adding a comment and assign a shortcut to it. That’s it. You don’t have to add anything else to the macro. Using the macro will automatically open each new comment in a Reviewing Pane along the bottom of the screen (see figure).
Continue reading Horizontal Review Pane for MacPrevent Find and Replace from turning into “search and destroy” by using the Whole Word Only, option (“Find whole words only,” for Windows users). This feature helps you replace only whole words, and not matching fragments within other words.
By simply selecting Whole Word Only, the software will identify only “man” and not “human“, for example. This helps to avoid replacement errors such as “inclient services” when attempting to replace instances of “patient.”
Continue reading Find and Replace, Not Search and Destroy
You know how to search for exact words and phrases. Add wildcards to your terms and you’ll give Find and Replace a nitro boost!
Find and Replace is both an essential tool in the editor’s toolbox and the source of ruination. (Into every editor’s life, a hilariously bad Replace All will fall.) You can use “regular expressions” to turbo boost your F&R!
Continue reading Regular Expressions Will Turbo Boost Your Find & Replace
If you are pasting new content into a file, you may have to reset the language for that material as well. It is possible to set a different language for each word in a file, and Word seems to keep the language settings from the source document when pasting content. Sometimes it feels like I am constantly selecting all (⌘ + A) and resetting the language!
Visuals and figures are catch-all terms that describe any content that is not body text or a heading. These can include photographs, diagrams, drawings and other art, as well as graphs and sometimes charts or tables. Copyediting means changes to the labels or sometimes to the display of values (such as fixing the length of bars on a graph; see the full list in the link below). Sometimes it’s possible and helpful to edit these visuals right in the MS Word manuscript. Here’s how.
If graphs are linked Excel creations, it’s often possible to double-click on the graph and then navigate within the visual to fix some titles and some labels while still in Word. Editing the source file is necessary to fix category labels, data points, and the like. If the Excel source file is available on your computer, double-clicking the image in the Word file may launch Excel and give you full access to the contents. Be sure to note that changes were made, as Word won’t track that.
Download the checklist for editing graphs.
Alt text for accessible graphs is best kept brief and descriptive. Do not data-dump.
When diagrams and technical art such as flow charts were created in Word — perhaps using the Smart Art function on the Insert ribbon — it’s usually possible to edit them directly, right in the Word manuscript. As with graphs, click on the element once, and then click again to access the contents.
Editing details such as font type and size, or the colour scheme might be futile, as Word changes these aspects “responsively” when visuals are resized or at other whims, and because the designer may be making grand changes later. So ask if you should bother or not.
Alt text for accessible diagrams is best kept brief and descriptive. Do not just repeat labels.
This is not something that copyeditors do nor is Word appropriate software for doing that. Leave a comment with the requested changes.
Check out this checklist for editing visuals (suggesting changes) so you don’t miss a thing.
Leave a comment about the changes that were made, as Word will not mark up the changes itself. Avoid fancy letter formatting to indicate changes (e.g. underlining, colouring, etc.), as this requires someone to clean it all up as laboriously as you applied it. It is likely to get missed and end up in the final product.
Word does not like to attach a comment to a visual. If you must leave a comment — to request changes, for example — either attach it to the figure number or to another character immediately before or after the visual. In the comment, refer to the visual by number or another defining feature such as its title.
Figures are often not editable in Word. And when they are, it’s rare that editing them in Word will give the best results or that the changes will be picked up by the formatter. The design team may be working from a folder of original art rather than with what’s in the Word manuscript. Most often, it’s best to leave a comment requesting changes, rather than making the changes.
Double-clicking a figure opens a different function: a pane on the right that lets you change attributes of the “shape,” but not its contents. Either click slower or right-click on the visual and select Edit Text from the menu that pops up.
For changes to non-text contents of visuals, it can be more effective to create a PDF and draw on it to describe your requests. After all, designers are visual communicators, and long prose describing changes can be lost on them.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
Learn with us! Join a course today.
© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!