Today’s tip comes from page 13 of the 2nd edition of Editing in Word:
Turn off Track Changes when using wildcards in a find and replace.
Wildcards are the elements that tell Word to do things like:
The footnote function is one of the great features of Word: it will automatically change numbering, place them in order at the bottom of the page, shift them as pages grow and shrink, and renumber when they are moved around. The endnote function is similarly great. And even better, you can use both in one document!
However, editing footnotes and endnotes poses some challenges. Sure, Word will track changes you make to the words in the note, but it doesn’t handle other edits quite so smoothly, as shown in the demo video below.
Continue reading Editing Footnotes & Endnotes
Word malfunctions in myriad ways, but sometimes it gets borked in SPECTACULAR ways. I have seen it completely obliterate any copy of the file, as though it borrowed the infinity gauntlet. It has spread a comment into tiny bits over the subsequent comments (see image). It has caught the vapours and decided it simply cannot show tracked changes anymore or run spellcheck…
Continue reading Troubleshooting Catastrophic MS Word FailuresRight on the Home ribbon in MS Word you’ll find a Sort button. It’s handy for alphabetizing, to be sure, but you can use this as a hack to find duplicates in a bibliography too.
Some bibliographic styles list references in the order they are mentioned within the body of the text. This means they’re in 1, 2, 3 order rather than alphabetized by author name. Especially when a text is team written, duplicate entries can happen, and they’re hard to find when the bib or refs list is long.
Sort, to the rescue! With a couple steps, first. Watch the demo video or follow the 3 easy steps below.
This sort trick can also help you spot small inconsistencies in author names, such as Department for defence vs Department of defence.
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Has your writer used all uppercase letters “for legibility”? Did they use them liberally for emphasis? Fix it all with a click (or 3):
They look nice, and some would say they facilitate reading ease. But curly quotes can cause snafus with macros, wildcards, and content management systems (CMS) like online education interfaces and website back ends. And sometimes Word just doesn’t want to create a mark with the right curl. Here’s how to fix those snags.
If your quotes (or apostrophes) are simply facing the wrong way, the easiest thing to do is type a second mark beside it then erase the wrong one. Or, use one of the keyboard shortcuts listed in the table below. Alt codes work on both operating systems but Mac users may have to turn on the alt codes (or even the unicode) keyboard first. Windows users should type the first two keys together, then press the keys that follow the comma.
| Alt Code | Mac | Windows | ||
| ‘ | opening single quote | alt + 0145 | opt + ] | ‘ |
| ’ | closing single quote | alt + 0146 | opt + shift + ] | ctrl + ‘, ‘ |
| “ | opening double quote | alt + 0147 | opt + [ | shift + “ |
| ” | closing double quote | alt + 0148 | opt + shift + [ | ctrl + ‘, shift + “ |
If your find and replace string isn’t working, or it is royally messing up the manuscript, try replacing all the curly quotation marks with straight ones before you run the F&R. Then change them back.
You can read about how to easily change them in this other post.
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Not nearly as flavourful as that paste we ate in preschool, but maybe more useful, Word has several options for you to paste content with. Get at the the options from the ribbon. Just click the little down arrow beside the Paste button on the left end of the Home ribbon to see the options.
Here’s how they’re useful:
Continue reading Paste Options in Word 365They got rid of Clippy but not many of the other annoying automated features in MS Word. Automatic formatting is something that most editors want to turn off before they work. In fact, this is why turning off most automation is covered in the “Get Ready to Edit” section of the book.
When you get a document in which all of the URLs (web addresses) are blue and underlined, and active (hyperlinked), you’ll most likely want to remove them so they don’t cause design problems or (horrors!) end up in print. You can do this one at a time, or in one fell swoop (globally).
Continue reading Quick Trick to Remove Hyperlinks
You’ve got a line under a paragraph that you can’t get rid of. You’ve checked underlining and the Style. You’ve deleted the final hard return, the pilcrow mark. But the line persists.
The problem is likely a border. Getting rid of it can be easy:
Sometimes a table seems stuck in its alignment. No matter how many times you select the whole table and set paragraph alignment, it won’t budge. The trick is to drag the table using its grab point:
To make sure the table aligns with the margins, reveal the ruler by checking the box on the View ribbon.
