If you’re an Australian with Telstra and are contemplating a cruise, be aware that Telstra’s daily international roaming/day pass fee (e.g. $5/day for NZ, $10/day for US) DOES NOT cover any time your phone might say ‘Cellular at Sea’ or similar and you will be charged for EVERY SMS and email received, even though you have no internet connection for other data. (Fortunately, there’s no internet connection otherwise the data charges would be astronomical!). How did I find this out? Because Telstra sent me a message when I had exceeded $100 and then $200 in charges (I was expecting $35 for 7 days ..read more

My review of Draftsmith, the new product from Intelligent Editing (developers of PerfectIt), was published by IPEd today: https://www.iped-editors.org/february-2024/review-draftsmith-certainly-has-a-place-in-an-editors-toolbox/ Draftsmith integrates ChatGPT with Microsoft Word in a seamless way. Although its target market is writers in the draft stages, it certainly has a place in an editor’s toolbox. IPEd: Institute of Professional Editors; the professional association for Australian and New Zealand editors ..read more

Someone on an editors’ Facebook group asked: ‘Is there a non-macro, non additional software way to select all equations on a manuscript in order to change their color? I’ve tried to find, without success, if equations use an style that you can tamper with, or if the equation tab has such an option. It’s an engineering manuscript, and going one by one would take forever.’ In my quick test, I noticed that when I inserted an equation using the equation editor (Insert tab > Symbols group) Word used a different font for it, but not a specific style, and that font was Cambria Math. Armed with tha ..read more

The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS) summarises the differences between these punctuation marks: https://cmosshoptalk.com/2024/01/23/hyphens-and-dashes-a-refresher/ Note, this is from CMOS (a US style guide) and other style guides may differ about spacing around such characters. However, most will agree on en dashes for ranges and em dashes for parenthetical points. For example, the Australian Government Style Manual has this guidance for the various dash symbols: https://www.stylemanual.gov.au/grammar-punctuation-and-conventions/punctuation/dashes Many of my clients use negative numbers in thei ..read more

UPDATE: This 2024 post has updated instructions for a post I first published in 2015. References. The bane of anyone writing a document that cites information from others. Gathering all the required bibliographic data for a reference list (whether in Word or in reference management software) can be painful, as well as formatting it according to the ‘house’ style. However, one way to shortcut the process is to use a (free) internet service that searches out the information for you AND formats it to your house style, or close to your house style. All you need are a few words of the title, perhap ..read more

Another annoyance with Windows 11 is the apparent lack of a quick and easy calendar that in many previous versions has popped up when you clicked on the time/date in the system tray. But it’s not there in Windows 11—instead you see the notifications and something called Focus. No calendar. Off to the internet, where, after a bit of sleuthing, I found that the calendar IS there, but it’s an extra (annoying) click away. To see it, you have to click the up arrow icon in the Focus section (illogically, clicking the actual date does nothing—you have to click the up arrow icon). Once you click tha ..read more

One of the annoyances I’ve found with my Windows 11 laptop is that the list of ‘recent’ documents when I right-clicked the Word icon on the taskbar showed documents I created 5 years ago that were stored on a OneDrive account I never use! And except for one template, none had file extensions, even though that I had turned on that setting as one of the first tasks when I first started using the laptop. How those old documents got on to my new laptop is beyond me (likely a background link to OneDrive?) and no matter how many other Word documents I opened, saved and closed, that list didn’t chang ..read more

Sue Littleford, an editor in the UK, has written a great piece on the 4 reasons she doesn’t track ALL the changes she makes to a document: https://aptwords.co.uk/tracking-changes-selectively/ Even though I don’t work with publishers or edit the sort of material she does, I fully agree with her reasons! There’s enough ‘red ink’ for an author to deal with, without overwhelming them with every tiny (mechanical) change. Text changes? I certainly track these, even changes to punctuation that may change meaning, but not every double space changed to single or dash to en dash, or every formatting cha ..read more

Caroline Orr, a UK editor, used ChaptGPT to create a macro to set the proofing language in PowerPoint to UK English, which she says works really well—see her second attempt here: https://www.orreditorial.com/chatgpt-powerpoint-macro/ In that second example, ChatGPT used msoLanguageIDEnglishUK in 2 places in the code to set the language to UK English. If you wanted to use this macro and change it to another language, then refer to this list from Microsoft for the codes for other languages:  https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/api/microsoft.office.core.msolanguageid?view=office-pia For ..read more

Contributed by one of my clients. I’m pretty sure my IT people did this when I got my new Windows 11 laptop recently—they told me to NOT turn it on until they were on the phone with me to walk me through this. Start the computer/laptop and get to the installation point where it asks for a WiFi connection. Unfortunately, there’s no option to choose ‘I don’t have internet’ as you could in previous Windows versions. Press Shift+F10 to open the command prompt. Type: oobe\bypassnro (no spaces, not case-sensitive) Press Enter. The computer will restart and begin the installation process again. On t ..read more