EDIT FASTER WITH FREE MACROS
By Paul Beverley
The life of a professional editor is great: I sit in the comfort of my own home
reading interesting books – and people pay me to do it! But some bits of the job
are repetitious and tedious, and that's where macros come in: they do the boring
bits and let me concentrate on engaging with the text. So, over the years, I have
developed macros that help with a wide range of common tasks. And they're now
available in a free downloadable book, Macros for Editors.
But aren't macros really complicated?
No. A macro is a just script that automates repeated tasks in Word documents.
And you don't have to write macros to use macros. My book offers a range of over 130
macros written by editors for editors. To use them, you just have to learn how to
load a macro into Word - and the book tells you how.
Just a flavour
Here are a few of my favourite macros from the book. Imagine...
- You're busy typing, and suddenly you realise that what you're typing is
gobbling up the text ahead of it. Yes, you have accidentally hit the
<Insert> key, and it is now in overtype mode. Bother! But this can be
avoided by installing the OverTypeBeep macro.
- How many times a day do you add a 'that' to a sentence? Or change 'that'
to 'which' or vice versa? One macro does it all – it adds 'that' if there
isn't one or it switches between 'that' and 'which'.
- How often do you change a comma into a full stop and make the next word
start with a capital, or do the reverse, or change to a semicolon, or a colon?
In each case, all you do is press Ctrl and Alt with the desired punctuation
mark, and let the macros sort out the case of the first letter of the
following word.
- You're reading some text and you see a word or a phrase and think, 'How
many times does this occur?' If you run CountPhrase, it will answer that
question, doing both case-sensitive and case-insensitive counts.
- You have a book made up of Prelims, chapters 1 to 10, and an appendix,
all in separate files. Even if the client wants them kept in separate files,
wouldn't it be helpful to have all the text in one file to make it easy to
search for something? And if you're using PerfectIt, turning the text into
one file massively increases the power of PerfectIt's consistency checking.
One macro combines them for you. (And there's another that splits a big file
up into chapters, if you need that.)
- Do you need to take all the pictures and diagrams out into a separate
file, leaving behind call-outs: 'Figure 1 here' etc.? FigStrip does that.
And if you have to do the same with tables, there's TableStrip.
- You see a word/phrase and you want to look back to the previous time it
was used. Select it and, with one keypress, InstantFind will take you
straight to the previous occurrence of that word/phrase. What's more, the
word/phrase is now in the Find box, so by clicking Ctrl-PageUp and
Ctrl-PageDown, you can jump through each and every occurrence in the text.
- You're reading the text and you see a number – '6', say – coming up and
you need it to be 'six', so you click somewhere on the line and run the
NumberToText macro, and it's instantly changed. Then the text says 'I've got
3 As, 2 Bs and 1 C' – so click, click, click (run the macro three times)
and it becomes 'I've got three As, two Bs and one C'.
I hope these fire your imagination and encourage you to look at the rest of
the macros. By picking the ones that best suit your way of working, you can save
yourself a lot of time, and they will enable you to produce a more consistent
output, especially in combination with PerfectIt.
Paul Beverley is an independent freelance editor who runs
macro training sessions in the UK and overseas, for organisations such as the
Society for Editors and Proofreaders. His book, Macros for Editors, is
available free of charge at: http://www.archivepub.co.uk/TheBook