Click the little pilcrow (¶) on Word’s Home ribbon to see all the behind-the-scenes formatting marks that make documents look good. But what are those marks? See the table for a list.
What are those non-printing characters?
Tag Archives: essentials
Find Comment Numbers
Word used to number comments automatically; you could see those numbers in the comment balloons at the right. Those numbers were handy because they aided cross-referencing and let us refer to specific comments in transmittal memos and other discussions.
Word still numbers comments, but those numbers don’t appear in the balloons in the markup area. Here are three ways to see them: in the Review pane, in Draft view, and by printing a list of markup.
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Print Tracked Changes and Comments
There are at least two reasons you might want to have a “print” copy of the tracked changes and comments in a Word document: to distribute hard copy, or to extract the information into a memo or other use. Print is in scare quotes because this method can produce a PDF just as easily as a paper copy.
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Change the Look of Comment Text in Word
By changing the style settings of Comment text, you can make the text size bigger, make the lines double spaced, change the font, its colour, or any other attribute.
Reject All Changes by Reviewer 2
In contrast to last week’s post, there are times when you may want to reject all changes by just one reviewer. Perhaps they misunderstood the brief, or used the wrong style guide. Or perhaps they’re the dreaded “Reviewer 2.” No matter what reason you’ve got, ditching their suggestions is easy. It takes only a few clicks. Hooray!
Continue reading Reject All Changes by Reviewer 2Accept All Changes by Just One Reviewer
When collaborating on a Word file, sometimes we want to (or must) accept all of one person’s suggested changes. Maybe they’re the big boss. Maybe they set all the styles in the document. Maybe, they’re the safety reviewer and their changes are essential to make sure no readers blow up; at least not because of this file.
Rather than clicking through each change, figuring out who made it, then clicking either Accept or Next, use this efficient method:
Continue reading Accept All Changes by Just One ReviewerClear All Changes and Comments from a Document
In the editing process, a “clean” file means it’s a manuscript ready for layout. All changes have been accepted, all comments removed, and the editing work is done. Or, maybe the file is nearly ready for layout and the team wants a version that could be ready if it suddenly must be submitted.
Good news! It just takes a couple of clicks to clean the document of all tracked changes and comments.
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Make Comments Appear On the Left in Word
Comments posted in a Word document appear on the right, by default, in a region called the Markup Area. But you can have it your way: move those comment balloons to the left, if you want!
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Anonymize Metadata in a Word File
Sometimes editors don’t want their work time-stamped, as MS Word does automatically when tracking changes or comments. Or the editor wants the “user name” removed from the tracked changes because they used someone else’s computer, for example. They don’t want the client thinking they outsourced the work without permission.
There are two ways to change the user name tags on comments and tracked changes. One method is to use the Compare Documents function, which lets you specify a user name for all the changes found between two documents, giving them all identical time stamps. We’ll talk about that more in another post.
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Developmental Editing Tool: Navigation Pane
Some developmental edits require heavy lifting. If you’ve got to move sections of text, whole chapters even, you’ll love the convenience of the Navigation pane. Just click on a heading and you can move that whole section anywhere. Trick is, the document has to use Styles to set headings first.
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