Measuring and Managing for Greater Productivity and Profit

By Jack Lyon

The famous management consultant W. Edwards Deming is often quoted as saying “If you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it.” Here’s what he actually said: “It is wrong to suppose that if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it — a costly myth.” (The New Economics, 35.)

An example of something that can’t always be measured (but can be managed) is the quality of copyediting on a particular manuscript. Two different editors might not always see the same problems or fix them in the same way. So how do you manage your effectiveness as an editor? Is it based on your consistency in styling citations? Does it depend on your knowledge of a manuscript’s subject matter? Could it have to do with the comprehensiveness of your reference library? Copyediting depends on a number of factors that can only be described as subjective.

But unless you’re editing only as a hobby, there is one thing you should definitely be measuring and managing: your income — to be specific, your effective hourly rate. American Editor Rich Adin has written about this at some length (see, for example, “Thinking About Money: What Freelancers Need to Understand” and “Business of Editing: What to Charge”), and you should definitely read and heed his advice about this. You’re probably someone who works mostly with words, so don’t be put off by the math in these articles! It’s really important to understand what Rich is saying.

I know editors who make just enough money to stay above the poverty line; I also know editors who consistently make an income of six figures (yes, really). Would you like to know what makes the difference?

Those in the first group charge by the hour.

Those in the second group charge by the project (or the page, or the word, or even the character).

If you charge $50 an hour for your editing services, the most you can ever make is $50 an hour. But if you charge $5 a page, your hourly income depends on how many pages you can edit during that hour. If you can edit 10 pages, you’ll still make $50 an hour. But if you can edit 20 pages, you’ll make $100 an hour. To do that, you’ll have to be more productive (while still maintaining your usual quality), which means you’ll need the Microsoft Word add-ins I provide at the Editorium, particularly Editor’s ToolKit Plus.

Daniel Heuman’s PerfectIt will add even more to your productivity by automatically ensuring the consistency of your work.

Rich Adin’s EditTools provides a wealth of features created especially for the working editor. I particularly like Never Spell Word and Toggle Word.

To manage your effective hourly rate, though, there’s one thing you really need to measure: how many hours you spend on every project you edit. Now, if only someone would invent some software specifically for editors to track those hours. Well, that’s exactly what Rich Adin has done in his latest version of EditTools.

Rich calls this new feature Time Tracker, and you’ll find it on the left side of the EditTools ribbon:

Time Tracker on EditTools Ribbon

Time Tracker alone is well worth the price of admission, even if you never use any of the other features in EditTools (although you will). I won’t go into all the specifics about how to use Time Tracker, because Rich has already done so in an impressive series of articles at An American Editor called “It’s All About the Benjamins” (the complete 55-page Time Tracker Help file in PDF format is also available for download). And by “Benjamins,” Rich means money — which you should have more of, if you follow his advice and use this new tool.

By keeping careful track of the amount of time you spend and the amount of money you make on each project, you’ll soon be able take advantage of the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle, made popular by our old friend W. Edwards Deming. The Deming Institute defines this cycle as “a systematic process for gaining valuable learning and knowledge for the continual improvement of a product, process, or service.” Making money, for example.

If you keep track of your effective hourly rate (EHR), you’ll be able to answer questions like these:

• What kinds of jobs bring in the most money?
• Which clients actually pay the best overall?
• When during the day am I at my most productive?

Then, using the PDSA (Plan-Do-Study-Act) cycle, you can do things like this:

• Focus on the kinds of jobs that bring in the most money, and turn down those that don’t.
• Solicit more work from clients that pay the best, and drop those that don’t.
• Work when you’re at your most productive, and do something else when you’re not.

As you continue to use this cycle of improvement, you should see dramatic improvements over time in your overall income. Others have done it, and you can, too. It’s simply a matter of measuring and managing, using the right tools to improve your productivity and efficiency, and collecting and analyzing the data.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

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Lyonizing Word: Some Favorite Features from Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018

Jack Lyon

Making new macros with powerful features!

Bright-colored icons for all happy creatures!

Searching for typos with fresh wildcard strings!

These are a few of my favorite things.

                      (Apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein.)

The new Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018 has a wealth of new features, but I’d like to alert you to a few of my favorites, some of which are not immediately obvious but can be enormously useful.

Title-case all headings

If I had to pick a favorite out of all the new features, it would be this one. The previous version of Editor’s ToolKit Plus made it possible to select a heading, press a key (or click the mouse), and properly title-case the selected text. For example, a heading like this one—

THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE

or this one (Word’s default)—

The Ghost In The Machine

instantly became capitalized like this—

The Ghost in the Machine

with commonly used articles, prepositions, and conjunctions lowercased. That was great as far as it went, but why not make it possible to properly title-case all of a document’s headings without having to select them? That’s what this new feature does, for any text formatted with a heading style (Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on—or your own custom heading styles).

But this feature takes things even a step further, allowing you to automatically title-case headings in the active document, all open documents, or all documents in a folder — your choice. Now, rather than painstakingly capping and lowercasing by hand, you can have this feature do it for you, in seconds rather than hours.

But wait — there’s more, as they say on TV. This feature references a list of words so it knows what to lowercase, and you can edit that list to fit your needs. Obviously you’re going to want such words as and, the, of, and an, but what about beyond? How about through? Add or remove words to meet your own editorial style.

In addition, you can add text that you want to remain in all caps: USA, NASA, AARP, and so on.

Finally, you can even specify mixed case, with words like QuarkXPress and InDesign.

In my opinion, this feature alone is worth the price of admission. It will save you many an hour of editorial drudgery.

AutoMaggie

As you almost certainly know from hard experience, sometimes Microsoft Word documents become corrupted. (The technical term for this is wonky.) The standard fix, known as a “Maggie” (for tech writer/editor Maggie Secara, who has made it widely known to colleagues, although she did not invent the technique), is to select all of a document’s text except for the final paragraph mark (which holds the corruption), copy the text, and paste the text into a new document, which should then be free of wonkiness.

That’s simple enough, but section breaks can also hold corruption, so if your document has several of those, you have to maggie each section separately. Paragraph breaks also can become corrupt, in which case they need to be replaced with shiny new ones. The AutoMaggie feature in Editor’s ToolKit Plus takes care of all this automatically.

MacroVault batch processing

If you’re fond of using macros that you’ve recorded yourself or captured online, you’ll find MacroVault a truly revolutionary feature of the new Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018. It was included with the previous version of the program as a way to easily access the macros you use the most, including automatically set keyboard shortcuts to run those macros. Now it takes your macro use to the next level, allowing you to run any of your macros on the active document, all open documents, or all documents in a folder.

Not only that, but you can specify which parts of a document you want to use — the main text, text boxes, footnotes, endnotes, headers, footers, and comments. This brings enormous power and flexibility to your macro collection.

FileCleaner saved settings

FileCleaner has lots of new (and useful!) cleanup options — so many, in fact, that I’ve had to put each kind of option on its own tab, one for each of the following:

• Breaks, Returns, Spaces, Tabs
• Dashes
• Hyphenation
• Formatting
• Text
• Punctuation
• Miscellaneous

But I think the slickest new feature in FileCleaner is the ability to save entire sets of options for future use.

Just enter a name for a set of options (for a certain client, a certain kind of manuscript, or whatever). Then click OK to clean up those options. The next time you use FileCleaner, you can activate that set of options again by clicking the drop-down arrow on the right. When you do, all of the options for that saved setting will become selected. You can save up to 20 different sets of options.

Speed!

My final favorite thing isn’t actually a feature. Instead, it’s the speed of nearly all the features in Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018.

I originally wrote many of my programs back in the 1990s, using the clunky, old-fashioned WordBasic language. When Microsoft Word 97 was released, it featured a new language — VBA (Visual Basic for Applications), but it would also convert WordBasic macros into pseudo-VBA so the macros would continue to work in the new software. That pseudo-VBA has been the basis for my original programs ever since.

Now, in Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018, I’ve rewritten most of the code from the ground up in native VBA. It took a long time to do that (nearly 28,000 lines of code!), but the resulting software is fast. NoteStripper, for example, used to strip notes to text by selecting, copying, and pasting each note. It worked, but if a document had lots of notes, it took a long time. Now, NoteStripper strips notes to text without selecting, copying, or pasting anything. Everything is done using the built-in text ranges of the notes and the document itself, and wow, what a difference!

For purposes of comparison, I just used NoteStripper on a document with 100 notes. The old version took 25 seconds — not bad. The new version took 2 seconds — making it more than 10 times faster than the old one. If you’re working on a big book with a short deadline, that kind of speed can make a real difference in your ability to get the job done.

In conclusion

I hope you’ll try the new Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018 (which runs in Word 2016 on Macintosh, and in Word 2010, 2013, and 2016 on PCs), and that it will become one of your favorite things! If there are any features you particularly like, I’d love to hear what they are. If there are any features you would like to work differently, I’d love to hear about that as well.

Finally, if there are any features you think needed to be added, please let me know. I’d like to make Editor’s ToolKit Plus as useful as possible.

By the way, I continue to make improvements to the program almost daily. For that reason, if you’ve already installed Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2018, I strongly recommend that you download and install the most-recent version. You can download it here.

Lyonizing Word: Helping Authors Write

Jack Lyon

In my previous post, Lyonizing Word: Workflow for Writing, I suggested some tools that would help authors write without the problems that are almost inevitable when working in Microsoft Word. These include inconsistent and meaningless formatting, document corruption, fouled-up footnotes, incorrect AutoCorrect “corrections,” and so on. Unfortunately, most authors already use Word and aren’t likely to change. How can we, as editors, help them create Word documents that are well-structured and clean, thus reducing our own workload?

Word itself includes a feature that helps make this possible, although I doubt that many editors or authors are even aware of it: Restrict Editing. You’ll find this feature on Word’s Ribbon interface under the Review tab.

What does it do? It prevents authors from using arbitrary, meaningless formatting, applying various fonts in various sizes higgledy-piggledy all over the place as authors are wont to do. The only formatting they can do is with styles — and then only with the styles that you allow. You will like this. And your designer will like this. And your typesetter will like this.

At first, your authors will not like this. But once they understand how it works, they should find great relief in not having to design as well as write. All they have to do — all they can do — is apply a heading style to headings, a block quotation style to block quotations, and so on. They can get on with actually writing, rather than worrying about whether this heading should be bold and that one italic, whether poetry should use Garamond or Palatino. As technical writer Brendan Rowland notes in comment 153 on the blog Charlie’s Diary, “When you’ve worked with locked/protected docs in Word, you’ll never want to work any other way. Life becomes so much easier. No more user-created spaghetti formatting — this becomes a distant memory.”

Restricting Editing

Here’s how to set up a document that restricts editing in Microsoft Word:

1. In Word, create a new document.
2. Click the Review tab.
3. Click the Restrict Editing icon (far right).
4. Put a check in the box labeled “Limit formatting to a selection of styles.”
5. Just below that, click Settings.
6. Put a check in the new box labeled “Limit formatting to a selection of styles.”
7. Put a check in the box next to each style that you want your authors to be able to use. For recommendations on what those styles might be, see my article “But What Styles?”
8. Under the Formatting heading, make sure the first box is unchecked and the last two are.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Now, in the task pane on the right, click the button labeled “Yes, Start Enforcing Protection.”
11. To enforce protection, enter a password, confirm it, and click OK. The password doesn’t need to be long and complex; it just needs to be something your authors won’t guess and that you will remember. In fact, something as simple as your initials will do. After you’ve entered a password, your authors can’t turn off protection, so it really is protection.
12. Save the document.
13. Give the document to your authors, instructing them to write their masterpieces in that document and no other.

Creating Character Styles

There is a problem with this system, however, and it’s a serious one. When you restrict formatting to a selection of styles, Word no longer allows you to use directly applied formatting like italic and bold — styles only, so no CTRL + I for you! The only way around this is to use character styles (not paragraph styles) that are set to use italic, bold, or whatever you need. And here, in my opinion, is what you need:

• Italic.

• Superscript.

• Subscript.

• Strikethrough.

What, no bold? Not unless you’re working with an author whose field requires bold — some branches of math or medicine, perhaps. But for most authors, access to bold means they’ll try to use it to format headings when they should be using a heading style, such as Heading 2 or Heading 3.

What, no underline? Again, not unless you’re working with an author whose field requires it. Otherwise, some authors will use underlining when they should be using italic — a holdover from the days of the typewriter.

Now you need to add the character styles to your document. Here’s how:

1. For the time being, stop enforcing protection on the document. Otherwise, you won’t be able to create a new style. You remember your password, right?
2. Click the little arrow at the bottom right of Home > Styles to open the Styles task pane on the right.
3. At the bottom of the task pane, click the little New Style icon on the bottom left.
4. Give your style a name, such as Italic.
5. In the box labeled “Style type,” click the dropdown arrow and select Character. This is key to making this work.
6. Under Formatting, click the Italic button.
7. Click the OK button.
8. Repeat the process for any other character styles your authors will need.
9. Again enforce protection for the document.

A side benefit to using character styles is that they can be imported into InDesign, where they can be set to use whatever formatting is needed — something that isn’t possible with directly applied formatting like italic or bold.

Creating Keyboard Shortcuts

So now the character styles are available, but only from the Styles task pane. Not very convenient; your authors are going to want their CTRL + I back. Here’s how to provide it:

1. Under the File tab, click Options > Customize Ribbon.
2. Click the button labeled “Keyboard shortcuts: Customize” on the bottom left.
3. In the Categories box on the left, scroll to the bottom and select Styles.
4. In the Styles box on the right, select the style you created earlier (such as Italic).
5. Put your cursor in the box labeled “Press new shortcut key” and, well, press a new shortcut key. Let’s use CTRL + I for our italic character style.
6. Click the dropdown arrow in the box labeled “Save changes in:” and select your document. Now your keyboard shortcut will be saved in the document rather than in your Normal template. Don’t skip this step!
7. Click the Assign button on the lower left.
8. Click the Close button on the lower right.
9. Click the OK button.
10. Save your document.
11. Give the document to your authors.

Now when your authors select some text and press CTRL + I, the Italic character style will be applied, so they can work without using the mouse to select the Italic style in the Styles task pane. Easy, intuitive, perfect. Rinse and repeat, with the appropriate keyboard shortcuts, for your other character styles.

At this point, you may be wondering why I didn’t just create this document for you. Stay tuned; next time I will, with a few little extras to make your life easier. But if you ever need to do all of this yourself, now you know how.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Workflow for Writing

by Jack Lyon

I do a lot of writing, and over the years I’ve investigated many a tool that’s supposed to help with that process. The most prominent of these, of course, is the bloated but powerful Microsoft Word. With my various add-ins at the Editorium, it can be a terrific editing tool. But for writing, something else is needed. Why? Because (as with most word processors) writing in Word is like scribbling on a scroll. Access to text is sequential rather than random (as I explained in my essay, “Changing Formats: From Scroll to Codex to eBooks”, although if you’ve used Word’s built-in heading styles, it’s possible to jump to those headings using the navigation window.

Rather than scrolling (or jumping) around a long, long document, I prefer to write in bits and pieces and then combine selected bits and pieces into a single document ready for editing. It’s possible to do this (kind of) in Scrivener using its “corkboard” feature (on both Mac and PC). Unfortunately, like Word, Scrivener strikes me as clunky, uncooperative, and overly complex.

Notebox Disorganizer

I’ve tried nearly every writing program out there, and the best solution I’ve found is the idiosyncratic and free Notebox Disorganizer from the Squirrel Technologist. (Sorry, Windows only — but please keep reading, as the other tools I’ll be discussing here work on Macintosh or Linux as well as Windows, and they’re well worth having.)

Notebox Disorganizer is a sort of spreadsheet for writers. It looks like this:

Notebook Disorganizer

The top part of the screen consists of boxes divided among rows and columns. Each box represents a separate document (although all of the documents are in the same file). We can move the cursor to the box we want to use and press ENTER. The cursor jumps to the document at the bottom, and we’re ready to write. To return to the boxes, we hit the ESCAPE key.

With Notebox Disorganizer, we can see the entire structure of our book laid out in a grid. Here, the book is broken up into parts that include the various chapters, but we could just as easily have each column be a chapter, and the boxes in that column be scenes. For nonfiction, each column could be a chapter, and the boxes could be sections of the chapter.

We can move boxes and columns around as needed. If we realize that scene 4 in chapter 2 should really be in chapter 8, we can cut the box and then paste it where it belongs. If we see that scene 4 should actually be scene 5, we can move it down. The program offers lots of flexibility. If you’d like to see the Notebox Disorganizer file in which I wrote this article, you can download it from the Editorium’s website.

(Note: The source code for Notebox Disorganizer is in the public domain and can be downloaded from the Squirrel Technologist website. So if you’re interested in customizing the program or incorporating its ideas into something else, the developer, Forrest Leeson, encourages you to do so.)

Markdown Syntax

Out of the box, Notebox Disorganizer uses Rich Text Format (.rtf) which means we can apply various fonts in various sizes and colors. Unfortunately, that encourages us to apply various fonts in various sizes and colors, when what is really needed is a proper document structure: headings need to be identified as headings, block quotes as block quotes, and so on. Directly applied formatting, no matter how beautiful, won’t supply that. To make that happen (and to keep writing rather than fussing with formatting), we can do two things:

1. Change Notebox Disorganizer’s preferences (under Tools > Set Preferences > Misc > Forbid Formatted Text) so that it uses plain text only — no formatting allowed.
2. Use Markdown syntax to specify (rather than apply) formatting — for example, use *asterisks* to indicate italic. Heading levels are specified with cross-hatches: # Heading 1, ## Heading 2, ### Heading 3, and so on. A complete reference for Markdown syntax (which is intuitive, human readable, and platform and program agnostic) is available as a downloadable PDF or online from GitHub.

Making a Manuscript

After we’ve written the various sections that make up chapters, it’s time to combine the text in all those boxes into a single document. To do that, we add boxes to the program’s “outbox” by selecting them and then pressing the spacebar. The result looks like this:

Outbox

If there are certain boxes we don’t want to include (research notes, for example), we just don’t include them in the outbox. After we’ve finished with our selection, we click File > Export the Outbox and give the document a name. Under “Files of type,” we select “Text.” Then we click OK, and the text is exported as a single text file, with Markup codes intact.

Turning Markdown into Formatting

Now that our document is finished, we need to turn it into a Word document. Why? Because that’s what publishers seem to want, unfortunately. But because it’s properly structured and marked up, we can just as easily turn it into a web page, a PDF, or just about anything else using the marvelous and (again) free Pandoc. (Pandoc works on Mac, Windows, or Linux.)

Pandoc is a tool that every writer and editor should have, as it can turn almost any document format into almost any other document format, which is something you might need to do sometime. For that reason, I’m going to ask you to try an experiment with me. It’s not hard, and I think you’ll like the results. Do this, in this order:

1. Download and install Pandoc.
2. Download and install Typora. (Typora, too, works on Mac, Windows, or Linux. Click the little arrow at the bottom of the home page; then click Download on the upper right.) Typora is an editing and rendering program for Markdown.

Have you finished installing? Great, then download from the Editorium website the Markdown document I created after writing this article. Put it on your desktop and then double-click it to open it in Typora.

Beautiful, no? Nice formatting and proper document structure. Just for fun, try some of the alternative CSS themes (click Theme) — or open the file in a plain old text editor to see the Markdown codes.

You can actually use Typora on its own to write just about anything (note the document outline on the left). As soon as you type something (using Markdown syntax), Typora renders it into an appropriate format. But we need a Word document, right? Well, one of the beautiful things about Typora is that it works automatically with Pandoc, so we can easily export our document as a Word file. To see this in action, click File > Export > Word (.docx). Now open the Word file (same folder and name as your Markdown document) and marvel at the result — a nicely formatted and structured document that any editor would be pleased to work on and any designer would be happy to import into InDesign. Please take a moment to contemplate how revolutionary that actually is.

Authors and Styles and Fonts, Oh My!

Now, if we could just get authors to write using Markdown, what a wonderful world it would be! Here’s why:

As you’ve seen, editors can easily convert a Markdown document into a Word document for editing, with all of Word’s tools at their disposal. The Markdown codes will be appropriately converted into Microsoft Word paragraph styles, with no extraneous formatting or messed-up footnotes to be cleaned up. Wouldn’t that be nice!

But what about authors? Why should they work in Markdown when they could just as easily work in Word? The reasons are many:

1. They can’t just as easily work in Word. In fact, most authors have no clue about how to properly do so. Word makes it easy for authors to mess up a document almost beyond belief, with inconsistent and meaningless formatting, document corruption, fouled-up footnotes, incorrect AutoCorrect “corrections,” and on and on and on. Editors are left to clean up all that stuff.
2. Microsoft Word is expensive — $149.99 for Office Home & Student 2016 (but doesn’t include newer versions as they’re released); if you go with Office 365 Personal (which does include new versions), you’re looking at $69 per year; for Office 365 Home, $99 per year. And those years add up.
3. Markdown is intuitive — easy to learn, read, and use.
4. Authors can create or read Markdown documents in any text editor or word processor (even Word) on any platform — Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, iPhone, whatever, without problems of compatibility.
5. Markdown documents can easily be converted into all kinds of properly structured and formatted documents, including Word, XML, HTML, LaTeX, and PDF — true single-source publishing.
6. Markdown documents will be readable and usable as long as text files are readable and usable — which is to say, forever.
7. As Markdown documents are nothing but text, they’re small, taking up very little room on a hard drive or thumb drive, and they’re easy to send by email. In fact, you can use Markdown to write email.
8. Perhaps most important, Markdown allows authors to simply write, without worrying about formatting and other complexities, thus increasing their productivity — which is something that benefits everyone.
9. If you can persuade your authors to write with Markdown, the benefits should be great for all concerned. Well, for all except Microsoft:

Imagine there’s no Redmond;
It’s easy if you try.
No styles or wonky footnotes—
Something easy on the eye.
Imagine all the people
Writing stuff in peace! (No “helpful” automatic formatting, AutoCorrect, etc.)
You may say I’m a dreamer,
But I’m not the only one. (There are lots of Markdown editing and rendering programs out there.)
Just try to write with Markdown,
And you’ll see it can be done!

(Apologies to John Lennon.)

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Corruption

by Jack Lyon

Alas, poor Yorick! I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy. He hath borne me on his back a thousand times, and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rises at it. . . . Now get you to my lady’s chamber and tell her, let her paint an inch thick, to this favor she must come. Make her laugh at that.

Hamlet, act 5, scene 1.

Corruption is never funny, especially when you’re on deadline and the Word document you’ve been editing starts doing not-so-funny things, such as:

• Repeatedly renumbering pages.
• Repeatedly rebreaking pages.
• Showing incorrect layout and formatting.
• Showing strange or unreadable characters.
• Producing error messages.
• Omitting text that should be there.
• Displaying text that shouldn’t be there.
• Hanging your computer.

All of these are symptoms of document corruption, which is most often caused by one or more of the following:

• Tracked changes in documents moved from PC to Macintosh or vice versa.
• Master documents.
• Nested tables.
• Automatic list numbering.
• Automatically updated document styles.
• Fields, especially cross-references.
• Deleted note reference numbers (in the notes themselves, not in the main text).
• Saving when resources are low.
• A corrupt printer driver (Word often crashes when printing).
• A corrupt document template, especially Normal.dotm.

Early word processors, such as WordPerfect, kept track of text and formatting as a clean, continuous string of characters and codes that looked like this:

WordPerfect Reveal Codes

When creating Word, Microsoft took a different approach, using numeric pointers to specify what was going on in a document. For example, characters 7 through 15 of paragraph 10 might be given the attribute of italic. (That’s not technically exact; I’m just trying to convey the general idea here.) The problem is, those pointers can — and sometimes do — get out of whack and end up pointing at the wrong thing. A typical Word document has thousands of these pointers, which are stored in paragraph breaks and section breaks. Pointers for the document as a whole are stored in its final paragraph break, and this is often where corruption occurs. The usual solution is to “maggie” the document (a process named for Margaret Secara from the TECHWR-L mailing list). Here’s how:

1. Back up your document, so if something goes wrong, you’ll have something to go back to.
2. Select all of the text in the document.
3. Hold down SHIFT and press the left-arrow key to deselect the final paragraph mark.
4. Copy the selected text.
5. Create a new document.
6. Paste the text into the new document.
7. Use the new document rather than the old one.

That, however, may not be enough. If your document has section breaks, they too can hold corruption, which means you’ll need to maggie each section separately—selecting its text, deselecting the section break at the end, and copying and pasting the text into a new document, adding new section breaks as needed. If you have lots of sections, this will take lots of time.

A better solution might be to use a macro that will automatically maggie each section (including the final paragraph mark). Here is such a macro that I hope you’ll find useful when corruption strikes. Note that when using the macro, you should have open only one document — the one you want to maggie.

Sub AutoMaggie()

Dim s As Integer
Dim secType As Integer
Dim secCount As Integer
Dim myDoc As Document
Set myDoc = Documents(ActiveDocument.FullName)

Documents.Add DocumentType:=wdNewBlankDocument
Documents(myDoc).Activate

secCount = ActiveDocument.Sections.Count
For s = 1 To secCount - 1
    secType = ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart
    ActiveDocument.Sections(s).Range.Select
    Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
    Selection.Copy
    ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
    Selection.Paste
    Selection.InsertBreak Type:=wdSectionBreakContinuous
    ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart = secType
    myDoc.Activate
Next s

'Copy and paste final section
ActiveDocument.Sections(secCount).Range.Select
Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
Selection.Copy
ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
Selection.Paste

End Sub

Now let’s look at the macro to see how it works.

Sub AutoMaggie()

That first line simply gives your macro (technically a subroutine, or “Sub”) a name, which can be anything you like.

Dim s As Integer
Dim secType As Integer
Dim secCount As Integer
Dim myDoc As Document

Those four lines set up (dimension) four arbitrarily named variables, which simply hold information. (If you remember high school algebra, you were always trying to solve for the variable X.) Here, s, secType,  and secCount are defined as integers (whole numbers); myDoc is defined as a document.

Set myDoc = Documents(ActiveDocument.FullName)

That line assigns the name of your soon-to-be-maggied document to the variable myDoc.

Documents.Add DocumentType:=wdNewBlankDocument
Documents(myDoc).Activate

Those two lines create a new blank document and switch back to your original document (whose name is stored in myDoc).

secCount = ActiveDocument.Sections.Count

Here, we count the number of sections in the active document (our original) and assign the number to the variable secCount.

Now the fun starts:

For s = 1 To secCount - 1

That tells word to do whatever comes next a certain number of times, starting with the number 1 and ending with one less than the number of sections in our document. Why one less? You’ll see in a minute.

secType = ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart

Here we get the type (continuous, next, odd, or even) of the next section (“s + 1”) and store that information in the variable secType.

ActiveDocument.Sections(s).Range.Select
Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
Selection.Copy

In those three lines, we select the text of the section specified by s: If s is 1, we select the first section; if 2, the second section; and so on. After selecting the section, we move the cursor one character to left so that we’re not selecting the section break (which could hold corruption). Finally, we copy our selection.

ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
Selection.Paste

Here, we switch to our new, clean document and paste the text that we copied from the section in our original document.

Selection.InsertBreak Type:=wdSectionBreakContinuous
ActiveDocument.Sections(s + 1).PageSetup.SectionStart = secType

Next, we insert a continuous section break. Oddly, the first line alone won’t do what we need, even if we specify the Type using the variable secType. We must add the second line, which needs an existing section break in order to work. It turns that break into whatever type we stored earlier in the variable secType. (It took a lot of experimenting to pin down this wretched fact.) Again, we have to add 1 to the section number (“s + 1”) because we’re inserting the breaks after the section text.

myDoc.Activate

Here, we switch back to our original document.

Next s

This is the line that has been incrementing the s variable that we specified earlier in the line “For s = 1 To secCount – 1”.

ActiveDocument.Sections(secCount).Range.Select
Selection.MoveEnd Unit:=wdCharacter, Count:=-1
Selection.Copy
ActiveWindow.Next.Activate
Selection.Paste

We select the last section in our original document, move back one character, copy the text, move to our new document, and paste.

End Sub

Finally, we end the macro.

After running the macro, you’ll be left with your original document (unchanged) and a new, unnamed document that is identical to your original but without the corruption.

That’s it! There are ways to make this macro more elegant and efficient, but, to paraphrase Blaise Pascal, I would have written a shorter macro, but I did not have the time. Nevertheless, the macro works for me; the next time you encounter corruption, I hope it works for you.

________

How to Add a Macro to Word & to the QAT

Here’s how to put this macro (or any other) into Microsoft Word so it will be available when you need it:

1. Copy the text of the macro, starting with the first “Sub” and ending with the last “Sub.”
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Type a name for the macro in the “Macro name” box — probably the name used after the first “Sub.” For this macro, that’s “AutoMaggie.”
5. Click the “Create” button.
6. Delete the “Sub AutoMaggie” and “End Sub” lines that Word created in the macro window. The macro window should now be completely empty (unless you already have other macros in there).
7. Paste the macro text at the current insertion point.
8. Click “File,” then “Close and Return to Microsoft Word.”

To actually use the macro:

1. Place your cursor at the beginning of the document.
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Click the name of your macro to select it.
5. Click the “Run” button. (If you wanted to delete the macro, you could press the “Delete” button instead.)

Here’s how to put the macro on Word’s QAT (Quick Access Toolbar):

1. Locate the QAT (it’s probably on the top left of your screen either above or below Word’s Ribbon interface).
2. Right-click the QAT.
3. Click “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.”
4. Under “Choose commands from:” click the dropdown list and select “Macros.”
5. Find and select your macro in the list on the left.
6. Click the “Add” button to add it to the QAT.
7. Click the “OK” button to finish.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: You Have Options

by Jack Lyon

Microsoft Word is packed with options, which is both a blessing and a curse. It’s great to have them, but it’s hard to know how to set them to best meet your needs. To see the options available, click File > Options. Then click the kind of option you want to see (General, Display, Proofing, and so on), using the menu bar on the left. You’ll see the associated options on the right.

“But how,” you ask, “do I know what all these options actually do?”

Detailed explanations are available from Microsoft’s website as follows:

Options	Article Title
General	Word Options (General)
Display	Word Options (Display)
Proofing	Select grammar and writing style options in Office 2016 Select grammar and writing style options in Office 2013 and earlier
Save	Word Options (Save)
Language	Customize language features in Word 2013 and later
Advanced	Word Options (Advanced)

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s explanations of the Advanced options are not detailed. For a few of those options, you can get additional information by resting your cursor over the little “i” icon to the right (you can enlarge an image in this essay by double-clicking on the image):

Information icon

The function of many of those options is self-evident, which may be why Microsoft doesn’t provide much explanation. (Actually the Editor Options [Advanced] page at the Microsoft website does give details for many of the options, even though it’s meant for use with Outlook 2007.) Some of the options definitely need more explanation, which I’ll try to provide here for the ones that look like they might be of interest to editors. (Some that look like they might be actually aren’t.)

Obscure Options Explained

Editing options

Use smart paragraph selection

All this means is that when you select a paragraph, Word makes sure that the final paragraph mark is also selected. That’s useful if you want to retain the paragraph’s formatting and settings, but not if all you’re after is the text itself, so you’ll need to decide which option is best for you.

Use smart cursoring

If you use the mouse and scroll bar to move to a different page in your document and then press one of the arrow keys, this feature places your cursor on the page to which you’ve scrolled. I see little use for this feature and keep it turned off. But now you know what it does.

Prompt to update styles

If you directly format some text, this option tells Word to ask you if you’d like to update the text’s underlying style to match the formatting you just applied. This could be handy if you’re designing a document, but not if you’re editing one.

Keep track of formatting

This option keeps track of your formatting as you work. It’s useful if you’re cleaning up a document with inconsistent formatting (which means most manuscripts), because you can then right-click some text and then click “Select Text with Similar Formatting.” At that point, you can change or clear the formatting or apply a style to all of the chunks of text that are selected. You can also display a list of the formatting used by clicking Options on the Style pane; then select the paragraph, font, and bullet and numbering formatting you want to track.

Mark formatting inconsistencies

This option is available only if the previous one has been selected. It tells Word to mark inconsistent formatting with a wavy blue line, which may give you some guidance about which text you should right-click and change, as described in the previous paragraph.

Enable click and type

This feature allows you to click anywhere on a blank (or otherwise) page and start typing at that point (if you’re in Print Layout or Web Layout view). For editors, this seems completely useless.

Default paragraph style

By default, Word uses Normal as the default paragraph style. If you’d like to use a different style, like Body Text, you can specify that with this option. If your document is headed for InDesign after editing, your typesetter might appreciate being able to use something more meaningful than “Normal.”

Show document content

Show picture placeholders

Have you ever received a manuscript that’s supposed to include graphic images, but when you open it, the images are replaced by empty boxes, like this?

Picture placeholder

What you’re seeing is a “picture placeholder,” which exists to keep Word from slowing down as it tries to display graphic images. This rather unintuitive feature should have been named something like “Hide graphic images to improve performance,” but I’m guessing someone at Microsoft didn’t like the implication that Word ever gets bogged down. You can stop chuckling now.

Even worse, if you edit in Draft mode, you won’t see an image or a placeholder; all you’ll see is what looks like an empty paragraph. If you delete it, you’re actually deleting the image, so watch out.

Show field codes instead of their values. Microsoft Word uses fields to generate things like indexes and tables of contents. If you activate the option to show field codes, you won’t see the index or table of contents; instead, you’ll see the field that generates it. For example, the field code for a table of contents looks like this:

{ TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u }

The field code for an index looks like this:

{ INDEX \c "2" \z "1033" }

Each of those codes includes “switches” that change the display of the generated text. Information about table of contents switches can be found in the article “Field codes: TOC (Table of Contents) field” at Microsoft’s website. Information about the index switches is found in this article, “Field codes: Index field.”

Word uses field codes for lots of things. The article “List of field codes in Word” goes into greater detail.

Display

Style area pane width in Draft and Outline views

This is a very cool feature that I use all the time. In the little box to the right of this option, enter a value — two inches (2″), say. Then switch to Draft or Outline view. When you do, you’ll see the style area pane on the left of your document, with the name of the style that’s applied to each paragraph. No more guessing! If you want the ultimate experience editing in Word, try using this feature with the Cockpit in Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2014.

Style area pane

Save

Prompt before saving Normal template

The Normal template holds Word’s styles, macros, and lots of other important stuff, so if you change any of that stuff, Word saves your changes in the template. This option allows you to choose whether or not Word does that automatically.

Hidden Options

Microsoft Word also includes some options that you can’t access through a menu, although they are accessible via macro, as discussed in the next section. Here are a few that might be useful to editors.

ContextualSpeller

The contextual speller identifies the structure of words and their location within a sentence to determine if spelling is correct. It can find errors that the standard spelling checker can’t. For example, if you type the words “superb owl” instead of “super bowl,” Word checks the context of the sentence and determines that the correct words are “super” and “bowl.” This looks like a fantastically useful feature; the problem is that it makes the change automatically as you type, so if you decide to use it, you’ll need to watch it carefully.

EnableMisusedWordsDictionary

This option looks for the following when checking for misused words during a grammar check: incorrect use of adjectives and adverbs, comparatives and superlatives, like as a conjunction, nor versus or, what versus which, who versus whom, units of measurement, conjunctions, prepositions, and pronouns.

EnableProofingToolsAdvertisement

This option tells Word to notify you when additional proofing tools are available for download.

Changing Options with a Macro

To use options like those requires a macro. For example, here’s a macro that will toggle ContextualSpeller:

Sub ToggleContextualSpeller()
   Options.ContextualSpeller = Not Options.ContextualSpeller
End Sub

Line 1 specifies the name of the macro (subroutine), which is ToggleContextualSpeller, although you could name it anything you like.

Line 2 gets the value of the ContextualSpeller option and changes it to the value that it currently is not. For example, if the ContextualSpeller option is set to True (that is, it’s active), the macro changes it to False. If the option is set to False, the macro changes it to True. Hey, it’s a toggle!

Line 3 ends the macro.

To use a different option in the macro, just change Options.ContextualSpeller to the option you want to use. For example, the following macro toggles the option for EnableMisusedWordsDictionary:

Sub ToggleEnableMisusedWordsDictionary()
   Options.EnableMisusedWordsDictionary = Not Options.Enable
       MisusedWordsDictionary
End Sub

You’ll find a complete list of Word’s options for use in macros at the Options Properties pages (for Office 2013 and newer) and Office 2010 of the Microsoft website.  If you find yourself changing a certain option a lot, you might create a toggle macro for it and then put that macro on a shortcut key for easy access. No more digging through menus!

How about you? Which options do you love? Which do you hate? I’d love to hear about the options that work best for you.

How to Add a Macro to Word & to the QAT

Here’s how to put this macro (or any other) into Microsoft Word so it will be available when you need it:

1. Copy the text of the macro, starting with the first “Sub” and ending with the last “Sub.”
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Type a name for the macro in the “Macro name” box — probably the name used after the first “Sub.”
5. Click the “Create” button.
6. Delete the “Sub [macro name]” and “End Sub” lines that Word created in the macro window. The macro window should now be completely empty (unless you already have other macros in there).
7. Paste the macro text at the current insertion point.
8. Click “File,” then “Close and Return to Microsoft Word.”

To actually use the macro:

1. Place your cursor in your text.
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Click the name of your macro to select it.
5. Click the “Run” button. (If you wanted to delete the macro, you could press the “Delete” button instead.)

Here’s how to put the macro on Word’s QAT (Quick Access Toolbar):

1. Locate the QAT (it’s probably on the top left of your screen either above or below Word’s Ribbon interface).
2. Right-click the QAT.
3. Click “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.”
4. Under “Choose commands from:” click the dropdown list and select “Macros.”
5. Find and select your macro in the list on the left.
6. Click the “Add” button to add it to the QAT.
7. Click the “OK” button to finish.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Microsoft Word’s Built-in Grammar Checker

by Jack Lyon

In my last missive, Lyonizing Word: Editing by Computer, I discussed some of the grammar checkers that seem to be popping up like mushrooms online. But I neglected to discuss Microsoft Word’s built-in grammar checker. Is it any good? And might it be of use to professional editors? Let’s find out.

First, I recommend that you set Word’s grammar checker to mark grammar errors in your document rather than “running” the grammar checker as a separate process. That way, you can spot and fix the errors as you read, making changes as necessary. Here’s how:

1. Click File > Options > Proofing.
2. Under “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word,” check the box labeled “Mark grammar errors as you type.”
3. Click the “OK” button.

Mark Errors

Now you should see grammar errors flagged in various ways:

Flagged Errors

The double blue underlines indicate possible problems with grammar, spacing, or punctuation.

The dark red dots indicate possible problems with what Microsoft calls “More,” which includes:

• Clarity and conciseness.
• Inclusive language.
• Vocabulary choice.
• Formal language.
• Punctuation conventions.

The wavy red underlines indicate possible spelling errors.

For all of these I say “possible” because Word may get things wrong; you can’t blindly accept its recommendations. But they do give you something to consider, including things you might otherwise overlook.

To see and select Word’s recommendations, right-click the flagged text, which will give you a menu like this:

Menu

The grammar checker also flags many things that editors would be better off fixing with Word’s Find and Replace feature or FileCleaner in Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2014. If something can be fixed automatically, there’s no need to have Word check it and flag it; to do so would just mean more work, because you’d have to consider and manually change each flagged item. Examples include checking for punctuation marks preceded by a space, opening parentheses followed by a space, and double spaces between words and sentences. All such corrections can and should be automated.

Grammar Options

What, then, should you have Word’s grammar checker check? Anything that you think would be easy to overlook while editing. Here are the options that seem most useful to me:

Punctuation

Semicolon Use

Targets the use of a semicolon instead of a comma in two related but independent clauses that are not joined by a coordinating conjunction such as “and” or “but.”

• Example: They don’t have a discussion board, the website isn’t big enough for one yet.
• Correction: They don’t have a discussion board; the website isn’t big enough for one yet.

Comma Use

Targets a missing comma in front of an independent clause if the sentence begins with the conjunction “if.”

• Example: If you’re like me you’ve already seen this movie.
• Correction: If you’re like me, you’ve already seen this movie.

Comma after Introductory Phrases

Targets a missing comma after short introductory phrases such as “however” or “for example” before an independent clause that follows.

• Example: First of all we must make sure the power is off.
• Correction: First of all, we must make sure the power is off .

Clarity and Conciseness

Complex words

Targets complex and abstract words, and suggests using a simpler word to present a clear message and a more approachable tone.

• Example: The magnitude of the problem is far beyond the scope of humanitarian aid.
• Correction: The size of the problem is far beyond the scope of humanitarian aid.

Jargon

Targets jargon, technical terminology, or abbreviations that may confuse some readers.

• Example: The company hired a well-known headhunting firm.
• Correction: The company hired a well-known recruiting firm.

Nominalizations

Targets phrases relying on nouns that need extra words to introduce them and suggests using a single verb instead of nouns.

• Example: The trade union is holding negotiations with the employers.
• Correction: The trade union is negotiating with the employers.

Wordiness

Targets redundant and needless words.

• Example: Her backpack was large in size.
• Correction: Her backpack was large.

Words Expressing Uncertainty

Targets words that express uncertainty or lessen the impact of a statement.

• Example: They largely decorated the kitchen with old bottles.
• Correction: They decorated the kitchen with old bottles.

Inclusive Language

Gender-Specific Language

Targets gendered language which may be perceived as excluding, dismissive, or stereotyping.

• Example: We need more policemen to maintain public safety.
• Correction: We need more police officers to maintain public safety.

Vocabulary Choice

Clichés

Targets overused and predictable words or phrases and suggests to replace them with an alternative phrase.

• Example: Institutions seem caught between a rock and a hard place.
• Correction: Institutions seem caught in a difficult situation.

Formal Language

Contractions

Targets contractions (e.g., let’s, we’ve, can’t), which should be avoided in formal writing.

• Example: The animal won’t be authorized to be out of the bag during the flight.
• Correction: The animal will not be authorized to be out of the bag during the flight.

Informal Language

Targets informal words and phrases that are more appropriate for familiar, conversational settings.

• Example: Our lounge includes comfy massage chairs.
• Correction: Our lounge includes comfortable massage chairs.

Slang

Targets regional expressions or slang terms that may not be understood by a general audience and should be avoided in formal writing.

• Example: My cat barfed all over my homework last night.
• Correction: My cat vomited all over my homework last night. [Yes, a fine example of formal writing.]

Punctuation Conventions

Oxford Comma

Targets a missing comma after the second-to-last item in a list.

• Example: I enjoy apples, pears and oranges.
• Correction: I enjoy apples, pears, and oranges.

Other Options

Many more options are available; you can see the whole list at Microsoft’s website.

Many of the options seemed designed to help writers whose primary language is not English; a few appear to have been dreamed up by Microsoft’s marketing department as just one more thing to include. Fortunately, you can choose the items that you think might be most useful to you. Here’s how:

1. Click File > Options > Proofing.
2. Under “When correcting spelling and grammar in Word,” click “Settings.”
3. On the “Writing style” menu, select “Grammar” or “Grammar & More.”
4. Scroll down to see all of the options available; select or clear any rules that you want the grammar checker to flag or ignore. (Note: Any changes you make here will apply to all documents that you open in Word. If you want to go back to Microsoft’s default settings, click “Reset All.”)
5. When you’re finished, click the “OK” button.

Options

Writing Styles

Rich Adin asked, “What types of manuscripts does Microsoft’s grammar help work best with, and with what types will it only cause problems? For example, it is clear to me, based on my experience with grammar checkers, that they tend to do better with short, nontechnical documents than with long, technical documents. Writing a short essay with grammar checking on might be helpful; editing a 100-page medical chapter that is replete with acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, measures, chemical formulas, clinical terms, and the like with grammar checking turned on is inviting problems and a great slowing of the editing process.”

Versions of Word before 2016 included various writing styles that you could select for the kind of document you were editing:

• Casual
• Standard
• Formal
• Technical
• Custom

Of course, “Custom” was probably the most useful style, as you could select the items you wanted it to check. Unfortunately, Word 2016 includes only two writing styles:

• Grammar & More
• Grammar

Those are of limited help, although Microsoft claims to be working on new styles to be added in future updates.

In the meantime, I’d recommend selecting only the grammar options that you think might really be of help. Here, less is definitely more.

If, however, the idea of using a more advanced grammar checker appeals to you, you might try Grammarly’s free add-in for Microsoft Word.

Toggling the Grammar Checker

Turning the grammar checker off and on requires digging through several Word menus—it’s not easily done. So let’s solve that problem with a macro:

Sub ToggleGrammarErrors()
   Dim GrammarCheck
   GrammarCheck = Options.CheckGrammarAsYouType
   If GrammarCheck = False Then
      Options.CheckGrammarAsYouType = True
      ActiveDocument.ShowGrammaticalErrors = True
   Else
      Options.CheckGrammarAsYouType = False
      ActiveDocument.ShowGrammaticalErrors = False
   End If
   Application.ScreenRefresh
End Sub

Here’s how the macro works:

Dim GrammarCheck

That line defines (“dimensions”) a variable called “GrammarCheck.” We’ll use that variable to hold the value of the current setting (grammar checker on or off).

GrammarCheck = Options.CheckGrammarAsYouType

Here, we get the value of the current setting. If the grammar checker is on, GrammarCheck is set to “True”; if it’s off, GrammarCheck is set to “False.”

If GrammarCheck = False Then
  Options.CheckGrammarAsYouType = True
  ActiveDocument.ShowGrammaticalErrors = True
Else
  Options.CheckGrammarAsYouType = False
  ActiveDocument.ShowGrammaticalErrors = False
End If

If the value of GrammarCheck is “False” (that is, the grammar checker is off), we turn it on by setting it to “True.” We also make sure grammar errors are showing in the active document. Otherwise (“Else”), if the grammar checker is on, we turn it off by setting it to “False.” We also turn off the display of grammar errors.

Application.ScreenRefresh

Finally, we need to refresh the screen. If we don’t, we’ll be wondering why our changes didn’t take effect, when in fact they did — a small Microsoft “oops.”

Unfortunately, Microsoft has not made it possible to set individual grammar options in a macro — yet another “oops.”

How to Add the Toggle Grammar Macro to Word & to the QAT

Here’s how to put this macro (or any other) into Microsoft Word so it will be available when you need it:

1. Copy the text of the macro, starting with the first “Sub” and ending with the last “Sub.”
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Type a name for the macro in the “Macro name” box — probably the name used after the first “Sub.” For this macro, that’s “ToggleGrammarError.”
5. Click the “Create” button.
6. Delete the “Sub [macro name]” and “End Sub” lines that Word created in the macro window. The macro window should now be completely empty (unless you already have other macros in there).
7. Paste the macro text at the current insertion point.
8. Click “File,” then “Close and Return to Microsoft Word.”

To actually use the macro:

1. Place your cursor in your document.
2. Click the “View” tab on Microsoft Word’s ribbon.
3. Click the “Macros” button.
4. Click the name of your macro to select it.
5. Click the “Run” button. (If you wanted to delete the macro, you could press the “Delete” button instead.)

Here’s how to put the macro on Word’s QAT (Quick Access Toolbar):

1. Locate the QAT (it’s probably on the top left of your screen either above or below Word’s Ribbon interface).
2. Right-click the QAT.
3. Click “Customize Quick Access Toolbar.”
4. Under “Choose commands from:” click the dropdown list and select “Macros.”
5. Find and select your macro in the list on the left.
6. Click the “Add” button to add it to the QAT.
7. Click the “OK” button to finish.

What About You?

Do you use Word’s grammar checker? If so, what options do you find most useful? I’d love to hear about your experiences with this.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Editing by Computer

by Jack Lyon

AlphaGo is a computer program developed by Google DeepMind in London to play the board game Go, which originated in China and is far more complex than chess. In March 2016, it beat Lee Sedol, one of the world’s best professional players, in a five-game match. I was interested because I’ve been playing Go since 1980. And why should you, as an editor, be interested? Because AlphaGo was not programmed to play Go; instead, it learned to play by “watching” and playing millions of games. (The same kind of learning lies behind the recent radical improvements in Google Translate.)

Now consider what the result might be if we fed Google’s computer thousands of raw manuscripts with their edited counterparts for comparison. Could the computer learn how to edit? I suspect that it’s only a matter of time before someone tries the experiment. (Although, as the Pen Master asks, “How does it know when to delete a paragraph?”)

In the meantime (while we’re dusting off our résumés), let’s look at some of the not-so-intelligent editing apps that are popping up on the internet. Do they really work? Are they a threat to our livelihood? Or are they tools we can use to enhance our productivity?

AutoCrit

AutoCrit, aimed mainly at writers of fiction, might also be useful for editors of fiction. It claims to check dialog, writing strength, word choice, repetition, and much more. It also compares your manuscript to other works of fiction to see how yours stacks up. You can take the tour and explore the features. AutoCrit allows you to check a writing sample online but, as far as I can tell, it won’t provide a full report unless you sign up for a monthly subscription of $29.97. You can cancel at any time and receive a full refund within your first fourteen days of use.

Wanting to see what the full report includes, I signed up and then submitted a short science-fiction story, “Nippers,” that I wrote about a million years ago and which you can at The Editorium if you’re interested. AutoCrit’s analysis was interesting, but I found it a little difficult to navigate, as it discusses each area on a separate web page. AutoCrit does give you a lot of stuff to consider, including:

• Pacing & Momentum
  • Sentence Variation
  • Pacing
  • Paragraph Variation
  • Chapter Variation
• Dialogue
  • Dialogue Tags
  • Adverbs in Dialogue
• Strong Writing
  • Adverbs
  • Passive Voice
  • Showing vs. Telling
  • Clichés
  • Redundancies
  • Unnecessary Filler Words
• Word Choice
  • Initial Pronoun and Names
  • Sentence Starters
  • Generic Descriptions
  • Homonyms
  • Personal Words and Phrases
• Repetition
  • Repeated Words
  • Repeated Uncommon Words
  • Repeated Phrases
  • Word Frequency
  • Phrase Frequency
• Compare to [other] Fiction
  • Overused Words
  • Combination Report
• Readability
  • Readability Statistics
  • Dale Chall Readability
  • Complex Words
  • Uncommon Words in Fiction

Here’s what the AutoCrit Combination Report looks like:

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to download a complete report all in one file.

Grammarly

Grammarly looks useful for general editing, providing a fairly thorough online analysis and even an add-in for Microsoft Word. I fed it the first paragraph of Paul Clifford, the Victorian novel by Edward Bulwer Lytton that begins, “It was a dark and stormy night.” Here are the results:

And now, I’m impressed. After I typed the paragraph above, the Grammarly add-in informed me that Bulwer Lytton should be hyphenated: Bulwer-Lytton. And that’s right, of course, so the program is much smarter than I anticipated. On the other hand, the add-in disables Word’s Undo feature (CTRL-Z), which to me is unacceptable. Grammarly gives you a partial analysis of your text at no charge, but for “advanced issues” it requires a monthly subscription of $29.95. You can get a full refund within the first seven days of use.

I also fed it my short story “Nippers,” which purposely uses bad grammar in its first-person narration. You can see the results at The Editorium.

Hemingway

Hemingway’s website claims that “Hemingway makes your writing bold and clear. It’s like a spellchecker, but for style. It makes sure that your reader will focus on your message, not your prose.” Again, I fed it the first paragraph of Paul Clifford. Here is the result:

 

 

When I first visited the Hemingway website, I had a hard time understanding how to use it. Fortunately, the “Help” page explains what to do: “Begin your document by clicking the ‘Write’ button. This will fade out the editing tools, transferring Hemingway into distraction-free writing mode. Here, you can work out your first draft free from our highlighting. Once you’re finished, click ‘Edit’ to transition back to editing mode. Now you can make changes with real-time Hemingway feedback. Tighten up your prose, clear the highlights, and then share your work with the masses.” The online version is free to use. The desktop app (both Mac and Windows) is $19.99. After using the app, you can save your work as a regular Word document.

For the sake of comparison, Hemingway’s analysis of “Nippers” looks like this:

 

You’ll notice that Hemingway has color-coded the text:

• Cyan = adverbs. I have 32, and Hemingway is recommending 17 or fewer.
• Green = passive voice. I have just 5 uses, well below the recommended 37 or fewer.
• Magenta = phrases that have simpler alternatives.
• Yellow = sentences that are hard to read.
• Red = sentences that are very hard to read.

The idea is to keep editing until all of the colors are gone. In actual practice, you won’t want to do that, unless you enjoy lots of short, choppy sentences.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to download Hemingway’s results as a separate file, as Hemingway is designed as an online writing tool. However, the Hemingway desktop app does make this possible.

You can learn more about Hemingway here.

I think out of AutoCrit, Grammarly, and Hemingway, the one program I might consistently use is Hemingway, just because it’s simple yet offers some useful observations, although I would feel free to ignore them.

Also-Rans

I also tried Orwell and Ginger, but neither seemed to work well for me. Orwell seemed clunky and buggy, while Ginger seemed rather basic, although its ability to rephrase an awkward sentence is impressive. If you’ve seen other editing programs I’ve overlooked, please let me know.

Here is another roundup by the NY Book Editors, which includes additional editing tools. It seems everyone is trying to get in on the act.

The Future

The programs I’ve featured here are useful in their own way, but they still require the educated eye of a human editor to decide which of their suggested changes make sense—something that I don’t think will change anytime soon.

What do you think? Will computers ever be capable of editing on their own? If so, how could we turn that to our advantage as editors? And how can we take advantage of the tools that are already available? I’d love to hear your thoughts about this.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Using Two-Part Buttons

by Jack Lyon

Nearly a year ago, I explained some secrets of Microsoft Word’s Ribbon interface (see Lyonizing Word: Secrets of the Ribbon), including two-part buttons like the one that activates FileCleaner in Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2014.

At first glance, this button looks ordinary, with a graphic icon at the top and a tiny arrow at the bottom:

Click the arrow, and you’ll get a dropdown list of FileCleaner’s features:

What many people don’t realize, however, is that the FileCleaner button is a two-part button. If you hover your cursor over the button, you’ll see a horizontal line splitting the button in two:

The bottom half, with the arrow, works just as before. But the top part is a different matter. If you click it, you’ll get full access to all of FileCleaner’s batch cleanup options:

Microsoft Word’s Ribbon interface includes quite a few two-part buttons, but if you don’t know about them, you may not be using Word as efficiently as you could. There’s no sure way to spot them without hovering your mouse pointer over them, although they always include a tiny black arrow (as do many one-part buttons). A good example is the Paste button on the Ribbon’s Home tab:

If you hover your mouse pointer over that button, you’ll see that it has two parts:

Click the part with the arrow, and you’ll have access to various paste options. Pretty neat!

So what other buttons have two parts? Here is the complete list, along with the default options you’ll see if you click each button’s arrow (as opposed to its icon). Please note that what you’ll see may vary depending on what’s going on in Word.

Home tab

Paste

Text Highlight Color

 

Font Color

Bullets

Numbering

Shading

Borders

Find

Styles

Insert

My Add-ins

Signature Line

Object

Equation

Design

Document Formatting

References

Next Footnote

Citations & Bibliography > Styles

Review

Comments > Delete

Tracking > Display for Review

Tracking > Reviewing Pane

Tracking > Track Changes

Changes > Accept

Changes > Reject

View

Macros > Macros

I believe that’s all of them, although there’s one that’s not on the Ribbon that you should be aware of — the Undo button, which you’ll see at the top left of your Word window:

Here, you can select items en masse and undo them. Is that useful? Maybe sometimes.

One thing you can say about Microsoft Word: It’s not lacking in features. If anything, it has more features than most people will ever use (see Lyonizing Word: The Right Tool for the Job). I hope this article will help you find some useful features that you may not currently be aware of.

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.

Lyonizing Word: Before Typesetting

by Jack Lyon

I need your help, Gentle Reader. I need your ideas. Back in 1996, when I started selling Microsoft Word add-ins at the Editorium, getting a Word document into QuarkXPress was tricky: Quark was prone to crashes and didn’t handle footnotes at all. To solve these problems, I created QuarkConverter, and NoteStripper. A few years later, when people started switching to InDesign, I created InDesignConverter.

In the past several years, however, both QuarkXPress and InDesign have become much better at importing Word documents directly, without the need for a converter. The crashes are mostly gone, and footnotes come right on in. Nevertheless, I’m wondering what else might be done to a Word document to save time and trouble when importing into a layout program — and I’d greatly appreciate your thoughts about that. Here are some examples of the kind of thing I have in mind:

• Add nonbreaking spaces to dates and initials.

For example, if the text includes a date like “August 17, 2016,” most typesetters want “August” and “17” to stay together; adding a nonbreaking space between the two elements does the trick. Similarly, if a name like “C. S. Lewis” shows up, it’s nice to keep the “C.” and the “S.” together. (To add a nonbreaking space in Word [Windows] 2007 and newer, hold down the CTRL and SHIFT keys as you press the spacebar. For Word [Mac], press the Option key as you press the spacebar.)

• Remove formatting “overrides.”

Typesetters typically want to handle formatting with styles, so that changing a style attribute in InDesign automatically changes formatting throughout the document. If an author or editor has applied styles in a Word document, those styles can be imported and used in InDesign. But if an author or editor has applied direct formatting using various fonts, that formatting will be imported as “overrides” on the text, which can be a bit of a pain to clean up.

Override Options

In its Styles pane, Microsoft Word offers to “Clear All” formatting and styles from selected text.

Clear All Option

The problem is, “Clear All” really does mean “Clear All,” including not just font overrides but also such local formatting as bold and italic, which needs to remain intact. InDesign’s “Clear Overrides” feature has the same problem. Do you really want to remove italic formatting from the hundreds of journal titles in that giant manuscript you’re editing? If you’re proofreading or setting type, do you really want to put all that formatting back in again by hand? My FileCleaner add-in includes an often-overlooked feature (“standardize font formats”) that removes font overrides but leaves bold, italic, and other local formatting intact, which is exactly what’s needed.

Standardize Font Formats Option

• Turn straight quotation marks into curly ones.

InDesign can do this—sort of. But it can’t handle things like “’Twas the night before Christmas” or “A miner, ’49er” (dreadful sorry, Clementine). FileCleaner does a much better job of dealing with this; it properly handles ’til, ’tis, ’tisn’t, ’twas, ’twasn’t, ’twould, ’twouldn’t, and ’em, as well as single quotation marks in front of numbers, all of which then come into InDesign correctly. If you have other items that should be included in this list, I’d love to know what they are.

• Remove multiple spaces between sentences.

In the 1800s many books were set with extra space between sentences.

Sample of 1800s Typeset Page

But, frankly, the 1800s were not exactly the golden age of typesetting.

1800s Poster

Modern books include just one space between sentences. Still, many authors continue to use two, following the instructions they were given by their high-school typing teacher back in the twentieth century. And that means the double spaces need to be removed at some point. InDesign has built-in find-and-replace routines that will fix this and a few similar items.

InDesign Find & Replace

FileCleaner, however, fixes many such things. And the version that’s included with Editor’s ToolKit Plus 2014 fixes many more.

FileCleaner Options

• Change italic and bold formatting to character styles.

Using character styles in InDesign provides much more stability and flexibility than local bold and italic formatting. It would be nice to have these styles already applied in Word before the document is imported into InDesign. My tools don’t currently do this, but they probably should.

QuarkConverter and InDesignConverter include some other useful fixes.

Quark Converter Options

 

InDesign Converter Options

Nevertheless, I can’t help thinking that there must be things I’ve overlooked. I’m an editor, not a typesetter, so I don’t really know all of the things that typesetters have to fix that they really shouldn’t have to deal with. (This probably includes the most common errors that proofreaders mark.) So if you do typesetting or proofreading, would you help me out? I’d really like to know what I’m missing — things that could be cleaned up in an automated way in Microsoft Word before a document is ever imported into InDesign. What problems do you routinely encounter that you wish would go away? If you’ll let me know, I’ll try to come up with an add-in designed specifically to fix such things. Your suggestions for this would be most welcome.

Of course, typesetters and proofreaders aren’t the only ones who can benefit from this kind of cleanup. It’s also valuable to editors, allowing them to focus on words, structure, and meaning rather than deal with these tiny but pervasive problems. Little things like double spaces and straight quotation marks may not seem all that bothersome, but like pebbles in your shoe, they create subliminal annoyance that really adds up, making editing much more difficult than it should be. At least that’s my experience. What do you think?

Jack Lyon (editor@editorium.com) owns and operates the Editorium, which provides macros and information to help editors and publishers do mundane tasks quickly and efficiently. He is the author of Microsoft Word for Publishing Professionals, Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word, and of Macro Cookbook for Microsoft Word. Both books will help you learn more about macros and how to use them.