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Three Microsoft Word essentials that will change your life

Three Microsoft Word essentials that will change your life

March 2, 2021 By Adrienne Montgomerie Resources

Though we love to hate it, there’s no getting around the fact that Microsoft Word is the defacto standard for word processing in editorial and publishing processes. And it does have features, functions, and plug-ins that no other word processor can compare with. Software that purports to be equivalent simply isn’t, and often inserts errors and major snafus with devastating effect.

The daunting thing about Word is the sheer volume there is to know about it. Even after writing a big book about the software and publishing nearly 160 weekly tips that aren’t in that book, I continue to discover new, useful ways to put Word to work while editing. So where is an editor to start!

These are the essential Word functions that no editor should be without—beyond copy–paste and automatic word wrapping, that is. You can learn about these functions in courses, webinars, books, and by searching for online tutorials. The biggest barrier is simply not knowing that these tools exist or not knowing how they can revolutionize your processes or eliminate grunt work. 

In a wide industry survey, what emerged as top features for editing were:

It’s hard to narrow the list down to essentials and, indeed, there are other features that editors feel they can’t live without (such as macros and spellcheck customizations). But if we accept that an editor must be able to get to work before they have mastered everything about Word, these three areas are the ones to start with. Beyond the “obvious”, here’s a bit about why each function is so useful during editing and in the production workflow.

Track Changes

Track Changes is the feature that automatically tags insertions and deletions so they can be systematically reviewed by the writer and other team members. It also places comments outside of, but linked to, the text, ensuring that a finished product will never end up with an embarrassing editorial comment facing readers (as happens from time to time, and could even lead to libel/defamation claims). Because Word notes the user making each edit/comment, the Track Changes feature also lets us filter, sort, and address each team-member’s suggestions in turn. 

Using it can be as simple as clicking the button on the Review ribbon and letting Word do its work. Using it well and fully can double or triple efficiency. See this tutorial for a quick overview of how it works or this brief look at some best practices.

Advanced Find and Replace

Find and Replace is a basic function that is immensely useful for ensuring that every last angel in your math manuscript becomes an angle, for example. But it is also notorious for going horribly, hilariously wrong, resulting in errors such as the one that once graced my own work: “inclient services” where “inpatient services” should have been. 

The Advanced interface opens up a whole lot of tools that boost precision and effectiveness, including “special codes” (regular expressions) for things like non-breaking spaces or graphics, and wildcards for finding whole ranges of words/numbers and reordering categories of content, not just replacing them, to give just a few examples. 

These simple strings can save hours of laborious keyboarding and ensure that every instance is caught but no false positives are—like a consistency checker at a basic, manual level. Grouped into a macro run at the start and/or end of each project, these replacements can mean never again lamenting double spaces, transposed punctuation around quote marks, extra lines breaks, and on and on. They’ll all be fixed together in a single click! You turbo boost your productivity, and thus, your effective hourly earnings.

Styles

Probably the most overlooked essential feature, Styles not only give a file a look and structure, they create XML tags that are picked up by InDesign and content management systems (CMS) which can then apply the preferred design instantly throughout. 

Within Word itself, Styles help with editorial processes from identifying headings and tables of contents to helping navigate the document; they can even make reorganizing manuscripts easy. Though what we see onscreen are font size and type changes, what happens is coding in the background that serves a host of functions. Changing the font settings is not “styling” a document.

Beyond the Essentials

I’ll be back to show those who have mastered all of Word’s functions how they can be combined in new ways to revolutionize your methods.

Header photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash. 

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