Thanks to a conversation on LinkedIn, over the past few months I’ve been working with Daniel, creator of PerfectIt, and Bernadette, one of my colleagues, to customise PerfectIt to cover the World Health Organization (WHO) style guide. It’s been a laborious process – the guide includes hundreds of preferred terms, and in each case we had to work out how …
More tools
I recently bought yet another e-book from Wordtips – Terrific tables. I can see that I will get a lot more use from this than from the Macros book, which was mostly beyond me, even though it did help me to get started with macros. From the tables book, I’ve already learnt some useful tips, such as how to: insert …
Getting organised
It’s been a major week for getting organised. First, I sorted out Thunderbird. Last year I managed to find and install a SmartSave add-on for the program, to allow me to save folders of emails to my computer when archiving a job (and I started this blog to brag about my amazing technological feat). However, that system broke down a …
Yet more resources
I’ve become a bit of a software junky recently. When I worked for a small business, there were young, technologically literate staff around, and when I ran into a problem I would simply yodel pathetically across the office until one of them came to my aid. Now that I’m freelance I have had to buy various tools so that I can do …
Pros and cons of software
I receive the weekly newsletter from WordRibbon.Tips.Net, which provides tips on Word 2007. A recent newsletter included tips about building blocks, which I hadn’t come across before. When I had a look at them (under the ‘Insert’ group on the ribbon), I found that they include matching sets of cover pages, headers, footers, text boxes and side bars. Since headers …
No need for online training
My attempt at attending a training webinar for Endnote was a disaster, because I couldn’t hear it properly due to a problem with my audio driver. No matter what I did with the settings on my computer, all I could hear was a tiny sound from the laptop’s speakers, and nothing from the headphones. This week I downloaded and installed …
Online training
I use EndNote for dealing with references when I’m editing a document, and thought I was doing a good job of working with the program. However, this week I happened to look at the EndNote website, and realised that Endnote X3 has lots of features that I’m not making use of (probably because I learnt the program with EndNote 9, …
Unexpected benefits of joining CSE
I recently joined the Council of Science Editors (CSE), mainly because I saw some articles on their website that were only accessible to members. Since joining, I haven’t had time to go back to the CSE website, so I thought I had perhaps wasted my money. However, as a member of CSE, I’m now receiving hard copies of Science Editor, the organisation’s bimonthly …
Avoiding an RSI
This week two major work deadlines and a minor family crisis combined to create a perfect storm of stress. My response was to work very hard (including getting up at 5.30am to edit a document), but I could feel the effects in my shoulders and wrists. I tried switching my mouse from the right to the left-hand side of the …
Yet another tool, and an XO laptop
This week I bought yet another electronic editing program. This one is called PerfectIt, and it’s designed to find errors and inconsistencies in MS Word. So far I’ve only used it to check a scientific paper that I’d already edited. It picked up a few errors (inconsistent use of hyphens and capitals). Now I plan to trial it on an unedited document, …