by: Rhonda Bracey

Recently, Bill Swallow stated on the HATT list: I’ve been a long-time advocate for efficient process and documentation. I base this on one key truth: I’m lazy. I’m so lazy, in fact, that I bust my butt to make things easier.

And so it is with me and Word. If I can find an more efficient way to do something, or to automate a tedious and/or repetitive process, I will.

For the past 18 months I’ve edited hundreds of academic-style environmental science reports for a global oil and gas company. The editing – or QA as we call it in house – involves everything from formatting (such as checking consistency in headers and footers, page margins, styles used) through to a full review of the content, including the usual grammar and punctuation checks, as well as checking lists of terms and making sure that citations and references match.

The documents are all written in Word 2007, all supposedly use the same template, and all are over 100 pages. Some are 600 pages, including appendices.

My edits are done directly in the document, so when the author gets it back, the changes have already been made. I only raise comments where I need the author to make a decision or to clarify something.

Invariably, Track Changes is turned on so the author can see any changes I’ve made. However, the main purpose of Track Changes is for the government regulator to see the content changes made between one version and the next. These documents are under Document Control with strict Revision History information kept – the Doc Control pages alone take up the first four pages of each document.

I’ve been using Word since version 2.0, and thought I knew a lot about Word before starting this contract – I now know many more tricks to make editing in Word more efficient. I’d like to share some of them with you.

Note: Many of these tips refer to blog posts I’ve written where you’ll find full how to instructions, and the first two sets of tips are general editing tips, not specific to Microsoft Word.

Tip 1: Set up your physical environment

Use two monitors. I highly recommend two monitors. I have swivel monitors that I rotate so they are in portrait orientation (just like paper!). I keep the main document open on one monitor and have my ancillary documents (terms list, references list, etc.) open on the other. This allows me to just move my eyes, not my mouse, from one document to another.

Invest in a decent chair. If you sit at the computer all day, then you need something decent to sit on. An investment in a good ergonomic chair is an investment in your back’s health and in your posture.

Tip 2: Be prepared

Follow the editorial/style guide. If the company doesn’t have one, create one – then get management support for it and share it with your authors. Our Environmental Team Lead was the one who instigated our editorial guide (which I wrote). Authors on the team are required to follow it, thus maintaining some consistency and saving some editorial time. Note I said some – while many of our team’s authors are good at following the guidelines, not all authors care.

Use a template and styles. Nothing more needs to be said.

Use a printed checklist. Create a checklist of all the editing processes you have to do. My checklist is seven pages long and only one item is Read and edit the content. Yes, this checklist could be shorter, but I’ve added quite a lot of information from our editorial guide to the Notes column, which helps keep me on track when I’m working through a long document. I always print out the checklist before starting a document, then check off items as I go, and jot down any general notes I need to relay to the author.

Here’s an example:

Tip 3: Control your Word environment

Customise your Quick Access Toolbar (QAT). I’ve added these to my QAT: Back button, Font and font size, Highlight button, a button to open the Styles pane, page margins button, next and previous section buttons, and an in-house document properties button.

Use the Browse Object button on lower right to skip from table to table, figure to figure etc.

Use the zoom slider to zoom in (e.g. 150% when your eyes get tired) and zoom out (e.g. 20% to see multiple doc pages at once and thus identify highlighted text, headers/footers not right, strange page breaks, etc.)

Use Header and Footer commands to speed up viewing a long document with many sections. For example, jumping to the next/previous section, jumping between headers and footers, and hiding the main document’s text when viewing Headers and Footers – this one is really handy for long documents with lots of large figures, tables etc.

Show everything! Display everything you need. It’s hard to troubleshoot a problem if you can’t see it. How do you know if a certain piece of text is a field or a bookmark? How do you know whether the author has used tabs, spaces or styles for alignment?

Use the decimal tab in tables with decimal figures to make them look much more professional

Tip 4: Use the keyboard for common (and not so common) commands

Use the keyboard. Mousing is inefficient for many actions, and can result in repetitive strain injury. You’re probably already familiar with many common keyboard shortcuts, but have you tried some of the less common ones?

Assign your own keyboard commands for actions you repeat often. For example:

Tip 5: Automate as much as possible

Record macros for repetitive tasks, or tasks with no keyboard shortcuts or easy access from menus/ribbon etc. Learn how to assign keyboard shortcuts to macros you use often:

Record macros for common but complex formatting tasks. For example, a new document might use a Quick Table you have set up in the template (Word 2007); however, an existing document from multiple authors may have a variety of table formatting. If the header rows of all tables in the document should look the same, record a macro for all the changes you make (shading, above/below spacing, row height, justification, font including|size and weight, header row repeat, etc.) and assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Record another macro for the main rows if they need to look the same too. Creating just these two macros for my client’s documents saved me days of reformatting hundreds of tables.

Use AutoCorrect, AutoText or applications like PhraseExpress for common text. When you have a long, complex or just awkwardly formatted string of text (such as a product or project name project’s name has eight words and some 50 characters!) that you use often in a document, automate it so that you only need to type one or two keystrokes to enter it.

Here are links to some information that can help you:

Tip 6: Learn more than the basics of Find/Replace

Find and replace is a great tool, but most people only use it to find particular words or phrases, and don’t realise that it is much more powerful than that. I’m still a novice when it comes to using wildcard searches, but I do make use of quite a few of the other capabilities of find/replace.

Find/replace special characters or formatting; for example:

Find/replace using wildcards; for example:

Tip 7: Control Track Changes so it doesn’t control you

Turn off Keep track of formatting in the Track Changes settings, unless you really need it. If that’s not possible, learn how to accept just the formatting changes.

Use a macro to accept all field changes.

View in Final view while you’re writing or editing to avoid seeing all the changes; switch to Final Showing Markup view when you’re ready to accept/reject the changes.

Tip 8: Find quicker ways to do things

With very long, academic-style documents that have lists of terms, citations, lists of references, appendices etc., you have to learn to work smarter. Otherwise, you’ll spend a lot of time going back and forth between various sections of the document.

For example, I separate out the terms and references lists that the author has added into new (temporary) documents. As I’m working through the document, I refer to these temporary documents, making sure that all terms used in the document are captured in the Terms list, and that all references cited are listed in the References list. Having two monitors helps enormously with this task.

About the author: Rhonda Bracey has been using Microsoft Word in earnest since the early 1990s. She cut her word processing teeth with pen and paper, then graduated to a manual typewriter, followed by an electric typewriter in the early 1980s. Next came WordStar and a few other forgotten MS-DOS applications before being introduced to Microsoft Word in the heady days of Windows 3.0 and 3.1. She has never used FrameMaker in all her years as a technical writer.

While Word is not her preferred authoring tool of choice (that’d be Author-it), she has spent many hours helping others use it and finding ways to automate some of the more tedious aspects of Word. Most recently, she has spent 18 months editing hundreds of large, complex Word documents. Rhonda figures she’s scratched somewhat more than the 10% of Word’s surface that most people use, but there are still aspects that she hasn’t used extensively, such as mail merge and VBA.

Rhonda lives in the south-west of Western Australia, and works (and blogs) from home for clients across Australia and the world.

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