Category Archives: Word-Wrangling Wednesdays

Q&A: Can I accept only formatting changes?

Q Is there a way to only accept all formatting changes without accepting moved text? I can’t make it show *only* formatting. I can hide insertions/deletions and “accept all shown,” but that would also accept moves?

A You got it! Just hide all changes except the formatting ones and “Accept All Changes Shown” as shown in the steps below:

Continue reading Q&A: Can I accept only formatting changes?

Try This! Restructure Using Styles

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 Styles

Q&A: Keyboard Shortcut to Exit a Comment

Q 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.

Troubleshooting

Continue reading Q&A: Keyboard Shortcut to Exit a Comment

Set Select Pages in Landscape

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.

Landscape orientation.
portrait of Adrienne Montgomerie
Portrait orientation.

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!

The Section Breaks are visible here as a double-hashed line at the bottom of both the left and middle pages. With the cursor on the centre page, we can see that the Orientation on the Layout ribbon is set to Landscape.

Troubleshooting

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.

book cover cropped to banner size
For instructions relating to section and page breaks, start on page 73 of the 2nd edition of the book.


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!

Horizontal Review Pane for Mac

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 Mac

Find and Replace, Not Search and Destroy

Prevent 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.

Like a refined Find and Replace, the red-billed oxpecker picks parasites off an impala without hurting the host.

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

Regular Expressions Will Turbo Boost Your Find & Replace

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

Make the Language Setting Stick

Click the Language icon on the Review ribbon to open this list of options. (The Windows version has even more English options!)

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!

Troubleshooting

Continue reading Make the Language Setting Stick