Saving time with MS Word add-ins

How Microsoft Word add-ins can speed up your editing

When they were first brought out, ‘labour-saving devices’ such as washing machines, dryers, vacuum cleaners and dishwashers were sold as great time-savers. Sadly, the promised additional leisure time has simply been absorbed into yet more work. It seems to be the same with editing. We now have a host of different tools, including various Microsoft Word add-ins, to make editing more efficient, yet the process of editing seems to take just as long as it used to.

Are manual editing techniques a thing of the past?

Before the days of MS Word add-ins and tools, editing was an activity that required long hours of focus and repetitive actions, checking and checking again for accuracy, going back and forth between the reference sources and the main document and so on. It’s not surprising that we’ve turned to new tools and technology to ease the load on our brains.

What Microsoft Word features are useful for editors?

For editors, some of the most useful MS Word features are:

• keyboard shortcuts, which avoid the need to continually switch between mouse and keyboard operations
• the Quick Access Toolbar, which can be customised, making it easy to access your favourite Word tools
• styles and templates, which make it easy to create a table of contents, move text, or see the document structure.

It’s easy to forget how long it used to take to perform all these functions manually.

What Microsoft Word add-ins could editors be making use of?

When you find that the built-in Microsoft Word tools don’t quite hit the mark, it’s worth investigating the many MS Word add-ins. My favourites are:

• PerfectIt
• Editor’s Toolkit
• PhraseExpress (which actually works across all programs) and
• EndNote.

Editors can use these add-ins to both save time and create a better end product.

Do MS Word add-ins and tools really save time?

There’s no easy answer to this question. Although the MS Word tools and add-ins can speed up your work and make it easier to do a great job, client expectations have increased, so the editor is expected to do more. In the same way that washing machines have given us the expectation that we can have clean clothes every day (or several times a day), onscreen editing has meant that clients now expect things like sophisticated page layout, automated numbering (e.g. for headings, figures and tables), and the ability to make major changes quickly and accurately.

Have MS Word tools and add-ins made the editor’s job quicker and easier, or have they just changed the nature of the work as client expectations increase? What do you think?