I was invited to give a presentation to the Editorial Freelancers Association’s North Texas Chapter about how to use macros, for absolute beginners. The presentation will be on Saturday 21st. Find out more here.
In the meantime, here are the macros I’ll be mentioning or demonstrating in the presentation. Most of them come from the great and wonderful Paul Beverley, who’s recently updated his website where you can find all his amazing work.
The macros I’ve mentioned here are the PC versions. If you use a Mac, you may find Mac versions in Paul’s Macro Menu. Additionally, he updates the macros regularly, so it’s worth checking the Menu for the latest versions.
Analysis Macros
These macros scan the text and look for certain patterns, then spit out a report for you to study. They don’t make direct changes to the text.
DocAlyse. Scans for basic style choice the author has made, and shows if they’ve been consistently applied. Great when you’re setting up the style sheet for a new client.
HyphenAlyse. Checks for consistent use of hyphens in compounds. Excellent for building your word list.
ProperNounAlyse. Checks that words spelled with a capital letter are spelled consistently, and highlights words with very similar spelling. Great for catching misspelled character names!
Speed-editing Macros
These macros make changes directly to the text, as you type, but cut out some irritating or superfluous button presses. Need to swap two words, change the case of a word, switch a comma in dialogue for a period (and capitalize the next letter while you’re at it)? These are the macros you’re looking for.
CommaInDialogue. This turns something like “Hello.” She said into “Hello,” she said. Pairs nicely with FullPointInDialogue, which does it the other way round.
VisibleTrackOff4. This toggles Track Changes on and off and changes the background colour of the page to yellow so that you don’t work with changes off by accident.
MultiSwitch. This uses a list of words you’ve created (where you’d switch one word for another, or numerals for numbers in words, for example) to easily flip them from one to the other.
ConsolidateTracking. Turns several messy changes into one clean one, which can make it easier for your client to understand what you’ve done. Minimising the number of tracked changes will also help Word run more smoothly on larger documents.
TestScroll is a macro someone made for me (I forget who! Please take credit if it was you!) which lets you scroll down a few lines and then puts the cursor back up a few, so you’re working in the middle of the screen and not at the bottom.
Lookup Macros
These macros take the text you’ve selected and search for it in the resource you’re pointing them to. This cuts out the time you’d spend copying, tabbing over to your browser, pasting, and hitting “search”.
MerriamFetch. Searches for a word in Merriam-Webster.
GoogleFetch. Googles the selected word.
NgramFetch. Searches for the highlighted text in Google’s Ngrams Viewer.
Handy helper macros
These macros help you to manage the macros you have.
CustomKeys. Allows you to easily assign keyboard shortcuts to the macros you’ve already installed.
KeystrokeLister. Reminds you of the keyboard shortcuts you’ve assigned.
FRedit
Paul also asked for guinea pigs to volunteer to test a new teach-yourself-FRedit tutorial, and I leapt at the chance to face something I’ve been scared of for a long time. More on this to come; it’s a blog post all in itself! But my first impression? This is pure sorcery. And it’s an absolute game-changer. Once I’d finished the tutorial, I spent about a day creating a FRedit list for one of my regular clients, which does all her specific silent changes, flags some problematic word usage, and applies heading styles to chapter titles and scene breaks according to her template. I showed her, and she was gobsmacked to see that something which had once taken hours can be done with a click, and a short wait (about 3 minutes).
Once I’ve got the hang of it and removed any bugs and thoroughly tested it, I plan to share my basic cleanup list as a download here, so stay tuned!
What macros do you use?
Got any favorites that I didn’t mention? Let me know in the comments!
