Font geeks love to debate readability and myriad other details about fonts. The other thing that matters when editing is being able to tell when the wrong character has been used. Font choice can cleverly conceal a wrong character hiding in a document: a 1 looks like an l, a superscript o looks like a °, an ‘ masquerades as a ′…
Times New Roman makes telling the difference between a 1 and an l nearly impossible. The superscript O versus the degree symbol is easier to spot; if you know what it should look like, that is.
The pink character in this word is actually the digit one. There are some indicators such as spacing and height, but it’s not easy to tell at usual working magnification.
Changing the font to one that shows a more drastic difference between characters is one solution. Some editors prefer to edit in Helvetica, Calibri, or Verdana for just such a reason. If you modify the font of the “Normal” Style, it’s easy to undo this font change before finalizing the file. The client will never know the trick that helped you spot those apostrophes that should be primes. Just turn off Track Changes when you change the font.
Verdana shows clear differences between the one and ell but if you didn’t know what a degree symbol (right) looked like, it might be easy for the superscript letter O to pass itself off.
Your manuscript just came back from the copyeditor or proofreader. Now what?
After you freak out over all the mark-up, tell yourself this is typical for professional writing, take a breath, and roll up your sleeves.
It’s time to check the changes the editor made, answer their questions, and clear up any remaining issues. The file will probably go back to the editor for some final clean up. If it doesn’t, you have to clear ALL markup to make it ready for the printer/ production department.
There may be a lot of work left. This is typical and does not mean the writing is terrible. Even if an editor wrote it, she could expect as many edits on her work; writing is like that. Addressing edits takes an average of 1 hr per 2500 words, so settle yourself in and let’s go.
The powerful Find and Replace function is one of the reasons editors still prefer using Word for editing documents. Despite the endless program crashes, and all the fails listed here, the power of wildcards and special characters (regular expressions) in Word just isn’t matched by Google Docs, Pages, or any of the myriad alternative programs our clients try to get us to use.
Yet anyone who earns a living using Word can tell you it lets them down in spectacular ways. Knowing some of the ways a Find and Replace effort will malfunction not only lets you be aware that Word may not have your back, but lets you avoid these problems too:
When someone’s name becomes legendary — becomes a verb, even — it can be a surprise to learn they had “another life”; a life beyond that singular fame. The editing world lost such a star this weekend; someone we have come to revere for the Word tip she shared, it was that valuable. And in Maggie Secara’s sudden passing, we learned she was a rounded woman, not just the namesake of a sanity-saving computer trick.
Maggie’s Clever Hack
If you’ve needed to resuscitate a problematic Word document, you’ve probably done “a Maggie.” Copying everything but the final pilcrow into a fresh Word document breathes hope into files that seem beyond redemption because Word saves a hoard of information in that last hidden character. And that hoard can cause Word to crash or fail, again and again. Omitting the final pilcrow purges the problematic hidden code.
“To Maggie” isn’t a technical term that Microsoft recognizes. This name arose in honour of this woman who popularized the process by sharing it repeatedly in an online forum for Word users.
Getting to Know Maggie
“Is that you?” Maggie Secara often got asked. “Yeah, that’s
me,” she’d say. “What can I say? I’ve never been a verb before.”
Though Maggie proved to be mere mortal, she is remembered for a surprising array of talents. I knew her as a technical writer and novelist, but many are speaking to her enthusiasm for things renaissance. In fact, if you’re working on something set in that era, you’ll find her book invaluable for fact checking: A Compendium of Common Knowledge 1558-1603.
Maggie’s writing and editing work took her so deeply into MS Word software, that she became an uber-user. She picked up the pilcrow-excluding file remedy in one of the user forums and shared it whenever it could help. One day, the planets seemed to align (nefariously) and several people had problematic Word files at once. Maggie explained this solution so often that others in the forum began asking: “Did you Maggie it?” The new term spread beyond that forum when one person spoke of it at a conference.
Since then, Maggie’s legend spread to other
forums and to the editing community at large. “The Maggie” has recovered
innumerable files from snafu, and saved almost as much sanity.
Rest in peace, Maggie. If only we could take back your final pilcrow.
Editing files in PowerPoint means you don’t have access to Word’s macros and other tools that make editing faster and more consistent. Sure, you could copy the content from each text block on every slide into a Word file, but the net savings just aren’t found in that method.
Enter the export: in PowerPoint, export the file as an RTF, then open that RTF in Word, save it as a docx file, then run your usual magic. Edits need to be transcribed into the PowerPoint file, but it’s still more efficient and effective than plodding away, old school.
Don’t Forget the Speaking Notes
To export the speaking notes, take a few more steps:
Select Print in the PowerPoint file.
In the Layout options, select Notes (shown below).
Select PDF as the output, then Save/Print.
Open the PDF and select all, copy, then paste the text into a Word file.
Each printer’s interface looks slightly different. To see extended options as shown here on a Mac, click the Show More button that’s probably near the bottom left of the print dialog box.
Click the third drop-down to access the option to print notes on a Windows computer.
Showing Changes to Files
There’s no Track Changes function in PowerPoint. But using the Compare tool in PowerPoint itself will mark up differences between the original and edited file for everyone to see — and vet — them. Vetting the mark-up is not exactly the same as approving changes in Word. Each change would have to be undone by hand rather than by clicking “reject”. The team might find it easier to work on a final version with the marked-up changes used for reference only.
An Imperfect Solution
Getting the content of a slide presentation into Word for editing isn’t a perfect solution:
exporting speaking notes takes an extra step (or more);
changes are not marked up as they are when using Track Changes in Word; and
changes must be transcribed into the slides.
But it’s better than working without Word’s efficiency altogether.
Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.
These fast and accurate ways to select text
can revolutionize the way you work. Keyboard shortcuts are especially good when
precision is required to cut, copy, or style content, or when a very large chunk
is concerned. These shortcuts won’t jump unexpectedly like a mouse can.
Not only do these methods work in Word,
they work in most other software including WordPress, Adobe Acrobat, and other
content management systems. (Instructions for Windows users appear in brackets
if they’re different from the Mac instructions.)
Select the word the cursor is in, then the sentence, paragraph, or the whole document using this toggle repeatedly: fn + F8. To quit this mode, press escape.*
Select an entire sentence with cmd + click anywhere in the sentence. (In Windows: ctrl + click)
Select one word forward or back of the cursor’s position with shift + opt + right/left arrow. (In Windows: shift + ctrl + right/left arrow)
Select one paragraph forward or back with shift + opt + up or down arrow. (In Windows: shift + ctrl + down/up arrow)
Select a word with a double-click and the whole paragraph with three clicks.
*The fn key lets you access the root functions of the F keys that are now usually mapped to shortcuts like screen brightness and volume controls. If your F keys don’t operate computer functions, you may not have to press the fn key.
