FOR EDITORS, PROOFREADERS AND WRITERS

Do you use PerfectIt to find inconsistencies in a novel? Do you follow The Chicago Manual of Style? Now you can use both from a single platform! I might be in love. Here’s why.

• What is PerfectIt?
• What is The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS)?
• What is The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt?
• Beta testing on a novel
• Why the editor retains control
• How to customize The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt
• Wow factor 1: CMOS learning at the editor’s fingertips
• Wow factor 2: Seamless access
• Wow factor 3: Shifting the burden of search
• What PerfectIt won't do
• How much does The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt cost?
• How to unlock access to the CMOS style sheet
• My beta test: The verdict 
• Where to get The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt

PerfectIt is software developed by Intelligent Editing. It helps editors and authors check a Word document for:

• Consistency: eg spelling, capitalization, hyphenation, acronym definitions.
• Adherence to style preferences: eg how numbers are rendered, punctuation of lists, capitalization of titles, ize/ise suffixes.

I’ve been using PerfectIt since its first iteration and, for me, it’s a must-have. Not because the human brain isn’t able to handle the checks it carries out but because software can do it faster.
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And that means I can spend more of my time (which is what my clients are paying for) helping authors craft a compelling story rather than hunting down important but small details.
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In other words, PerfectIt does the heavy-lifting but lets me retain complete control of the changes being made. 

CMOS is a 115-year-old style guide published by The University of Chicago Press. For many editors, even those beyond US shores, it too is a must-have because of its mindful, sensible advice.

CMOS isn’t a rule book. It’s a manual of style preferences. And given that novel editing requires a flexible approach to grammar, spelling and punctuation – one that serves rhythm and voice first and foremost – many editors choose to customize its guidance, ignore some of it, or blend it with another style guide’s preferences.

CMOS’s strength lies in how comprehensive it is, and the fact that the online version is easy to search.
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Even though fifty per cent of my clients write in British English, CMOS is still my go-to style guide because lots of its guidance can be universally applied. The rest I tweak to fit my authors’ needs.

Until recently, these two editing staples were in my editing studio but sitting at different digital tables. But what if CMOS could be integrated into PerfectIt? Afterall, PerfectIt has lots of built-in style sheets – why not CMOS too?

It was a beautiful dream. Now it’s a beautiful reality.

The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt is a brand-new product that comes free with PerfectIt 5, and I’ve been privileged to play with it. As I said, I might be in love.

I ran The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt on a 65,000-word test document – a copy of a thriller written in British English. 

Here’s what else you also need to know about my setup:

• The CMOS style sheet sits within PerfectIt 5
• I have an existing subscription to CMOS Online and PerfectIt
• I work on a PC and my OS is Windows 10, so I run the Windows version of PerfectIt
• I use Microsoft 365, which means I’m always working in the latest edition of Microsoft Word
• I’m based in the UK but work for clients all over the world and in a variety of Englishes and styles.

I chose to test a document written in British English style in order to illustrate the control editors and writers have over any changes PerfectIt suggests.

Just because we’re checking against the built-in CMOS style sheet, which has its own set of defined preferences, doesn’t mean we have to adhere to all of them.

For example, PerfectIt flagged up ‘amongst’. At the top of the Spelling Variations window you can see why: In American English, “among” is usually preferred to “amongst.”

Actually, that preference is common in British English too. But the instances flagged up here are dialogue, and the character who’s speaking would be more likely to use ‘amongst’. And so I elected to ignore the suggestion and click on the Next button.
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Using The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt therefore doesn’t force us to make inappropriate changes to a client’s work. The editor retains stylistic control. 

I love CMOS’s good-sense guidance, and find much of it helpful for all of the crime fiction, thrillers and mysteries that pass over my desk.

However, half of those books are written in British English style, which means I want to access all the functionality of The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt but tweaked for my own needs.

If spelling is all I’m worried about, a simple workaround is just to turn off PerfectIt’s Spelling Variations check. However, there are other customizations I usually like to do with novels in British English style in addition to spelling.

For me, the ability to customize PerfectIt has always been one of its biggest selling points. That flexibility is fantastic for any editor who regularly uses CMOS’s guidance but just as regularly needs to adapt key aspects of it.

​We can’t amend built-in style sheets. What PerfectIt does instead is allow us to create a copy and amend that. Which is why I now have this little gem in the dropdown menu of available style sheets: Chicago Manual of Style LHUK.

This is still CMOS, but CMOS for me and some of my clients! I’ve edited the copied style sheet so that now it has a different set of preferences:

• Yze and yse endings: preference set to 'Prefer 's'.
• Personal title format: preference set to Mrs, Mx etc.
• Hyphens next to spaces: preference set to convert to en dash.
• Percent symbol: preference set to open (per cent).
• Space around dashes: preference set to en dash with spaces.

​I retained the following:

• Quotes with punctuation: preference left at 'final before quotation mark' (because in British English fiction dialogue, that’s the convention followed).
• Ize and ise endings: preference left at -ize (because -ize suffixes aren’t American English style. They’ve been used in British English for centuries and are favoured by many British publishers).

With The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt, editors can access the best features of both from one platform, which means we can learn CMOS’s style preferences in tandem with our consistency checking.

Yes, we’re running PerfectIt 5. And, yes, we’re able to set it to work to CMOS’s recommendations. That in itself is a gem.

But the wow factor is the advice that comes with it – that mindful guidance I mentioned above.

In the screenshot below, you can see what The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt has flagged up: ‘long-time’ versus the preferred ‘longtime’. Now look at the comment above. This isn’t prescriptivism in play. Instead, we’re asked to ‘check carefully’ because of what Chicago ‘usually prefers’.
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That’s a subtle but important reminder that regardless of whether we’re following CMOS or some other style guide, we’re dealing with preferences, not rules. This concept is foundational to professional editorial practice, and I’m pleased to see it shining through here.

There’s more too. Perhaps we need additional information. Sure, we now know why this issue has been flagged up, but what if we want to verify that, just to be sure?

Perhaps we have to open our print or online dictionary after all. Not so. By clicking on ‘See more from CMOS 7.1 >’, we open another pane.

Within that pane are links not only to more detailed information from CMOS but also to the website of the external source cited, in this case Merriam Webster.com, which allows us to verify and learn if we want to.

Or perhaps we want to explore the issue in more detail via our CMOS Online subscription. It’s right there in a clickable link. 

It’s seconds saved, but those seconds add up – fewer keystrokes and zero searching for where the solution to our problem lies. The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt has done the heavy-lifting for us.

Editors often want quick access to information that enables us to develop our learning. Impatience and software aren’t always favourite cousins, and clicking through to external resources while a program’s in the middle of doing its thing is usually a no-no.

Would clicking through to CMOS Online or Merriam Webster.com in the middle of a PerfectIt run be too much? Would the software slow down, stall or even crash? Would that instant access to learning be more trouble that it was worth?
I’m delighted to report that the clickthroughs were seamless.

The nub of it is this. CMOS hasn’t been shoehorned in PerfectIt 5. It, and the external links built into it, are fully integrated. So when we want to access external content via those links, we can do so and be assured that the software will remain stable.
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That’s a big plus for busy editors who want software that works without clunk

CMOS is comprehensive. Any editor who owns the print version knows just how comprehensive. The online version made finding solutions to problems easier. Integrating some of the core elements of style within PerfectIt 5 has taken things a stage further. 
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It comes down to who or what bears the burden of search. Ordinarily, the editor does. We spot a style-consistency issue, open up our reference source, check the preference and make a decision.

With this product, the burden shifts. Now The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt is bearing some of the load. It’s spotting potential problems, suggesting the fix, explaining the reasoning behind that suggestion, and taking us to the exact place in one of the world’s premier style guides where deeper learning resides.

That’s a time-saver and a stress-reducer. No editor wants to spend time on searching for anything. Pro editors love to learn but none of us love struggling to find answers. After all, we’re paid to edit, not to search.

And so for those of us working to fixed project fees, time saved means a better hourly rate and a more profitable business.

I don’t expect my roofer to comment on the condition of my hair or how well my car’s running. Similarly, we mustn’t expect PerfectIt 5 to check our book files for problems it’s not designed to handle.

CMOS is huge, and there’s a ton of information in it that isn’t related to the kind of checks PerfectIt runs.

PerfectIt is a consistency checker, so if you want guidance on how to cite a reference according to CMOS or any other style guide, you’re still going to have to look it up.
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Same thing if you’re wondering whether to place a comma between two independent clauses separated by coordinating conjunctions. CMOS has advice on this, but fiction editors will need to consider context and sentence rhythm too. 

If you have a subscription to PerfectIt 4 and to CMOS Online, you’ll pay nothing. That’s right. Zero! You’ll automatically be upgraded to PerfectIt 5, which includes the CMOS style guide. Are you falling in love now?

You will have to grab the latest update from the Intelligent Editing website, but that’s always been the case.

So who needs to pay? If you have a subscription to one product but not the other, you’ll need to rectify that if you want to use The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt.

​Once you’ve downloaded PerfectIt 5, you’ll see that CMOS is available in the dropdown list of styles. However, there’s one more step you’ll need to take before you can use it.
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First, link your PerfectIt account to an active CMOS Online subscription. That will give you a new license key that unlocks The Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt.

I love it. So should you buy it? If you already subscribe to PerfectIt and CMOS Online, you don’t need to spend a penny! All you need to do is link both accounts and unlock the features.

If you’re already using CMOS regularly, want to build your knowledge about the guide’s preferences, and check for consistency in line with CMOS within a seamless interface, yes, I recommend you invest in PerfectIt.
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PerfectIt and CMOS are both trusted resources. This digital partnership will help all of us edit more confidently and mindfully.

Here's what to do:

• If all you need to do is link your existing subscriptions to PerfectIt and CMOS, sign in to your PerfectIt account and follow the instructions.
• If you want to buy PerfectIt for the first time, head over to the Intelligent Editing website.

And if you’ve bought one of my courses, there’s a discount code waiting for you on the course page.
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Then let me know if you fall in love too!

• Author and editor resource library
• Editing tools
• The Editing Podcast: How to edit for consistency and style with PerfectIt​
• Intelligent Editing website
• PerfectIt: The best consistency-checking Word plugin
• Onscreen work resources
• The Editing Podcast: Chicago Manual of Style for PerfectIt

Fresh eyes on a piece of writing is ideal. Sometimes, however, the turnaround time for publication precludes it. Other times, the return on investment just won’t justify the cost of hiring a professional proofreader, especially when shorter-form content’s in play. Good enough has to be enough.

Here are 10 ideas to help you minimize errors and inconsistencies.

Checking our own writing rarely produces the same level of quality as a fresh pair of eyes. We see what we think is on the page, not what is on the page. That's because we're so close to the content.

I'm a professional editor and I know that when I don't pass on my blog posts to one of my colleagues there are more likely to be mistakes. It's not that I don't know my craft but that I'm wearing a writer's hat.

Sometimes, getting pro help isn't an option. So what can you do to minimize errors and inconsistencies? Here are 10 tips.

Style guides help you keep track of your preferences, including hyphenation, capitalization, proper-noun spelling, figures and measurements, time and date format.

• If you’re a novelist, use my Style Sheet Template
• If you’re a business writer, check out the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP) guide Your House Style

This pro-proofreading checklist (free when you sign up to The Editorial Letter) helps you spot and identify layout problems in designed page proofs (hard copy or PDF). It’s based on the house guidelines provided by the many mainstream publishers I've worked for.

PerfectIt is affordable software that takes the headache out of consistency checking. And because it’s customizable, it will help you enforce your style preferences and save you time. It’s a must-have tool for writers and pro editors.

Microsoft Word’s onboard find-and-replace tool enables you to locate and fix problems in your document quickly. This free ebooklet, The Author’s Proofreading Companion, includes a range of handy strings and wildcard searches.

Word's styles palette ensures the different elements of your text are formatted consistently. This tutorial shows you how to set up, assign and amend styles. It'll save you heaps of time whether you're working on business documents, web copy, short stories or novels.

• Video tutorial
• Written tutorial

If you want fresh eyes but budget's an issue, swap quality-control checking with a colleague or friend in the same position. Pick someone who has a strong command of language, spelling and grammar.

Even if they're not a professional editor, they're wearing the hat of the reader, not the originator, and that means they'll spot things you missed.

Here are 2 tools to help you locate inconsistent spelling:

• TextSTAT: This concordance software generates simple alphabetized word lists that flag up potential problems
• ProperNounAlyse: An excellent macro from editor Paul Beverley that highlights potential inconsistencies in proper-noun usage

The Bookalyser analyses a text for inconsistencies, errors and poor style: 70 different tests across 17 report areas in about 20 seconds, for up to 200,000 words at once. It works on fiction and non-fiction, and for British and American English.

Microsoft Word has an onboard document-checking tool that flags up potential spelling and grammar problems. It's not foolproof (no software is) but it's a second pair of digital eyes that's available at a click.

Go to the ribbon, click on the Review tab, and select the Check Document button.

Read the text out loud. Your brain works faster than your mouth and you might well spot missing words, grammar flops and problems with sentence flow when you turn the written word into the spoken word!

Word also has an onboard narration tool that can do the speaking for you. There’s a tutorial here: ‘Hear text read aloud with Narrator’.

Macros enable us to edit faster and more consistently. For professional editors, that means a higher hourly rate, a more consistent output, and a happier client. If you want to use macros but don’t know where to start, read on.

Which macros, and when and why?
Which macros should you use? How does the Paul Beverley macro suite fit with an application such as PerfectIt? What should you use when?

No one’s the same. We edit different subject/genres, carry out different types of editing, and have different styles of working. There’s no one size fits all.

A conceptual approach, however, can help us decide which tools to use.

Analysis: Tasks versus goals
A task-centred analysis focuses on what we plan to do and deciding what tools will help with these stages. Thus, in the free book, Macros for Editors, I offer smorgasbord of macros that speed up a variety of specific tasks.
 
However, when we look broadly at what we’re trying to achieve, we may discover different ways of working and different tools – new tools, maybe – that can help.
 
One such contribution to this approach is the Alyse suite – analysis-type macros (DocAlyse, HyphenAlyse, etc.) that provide an overview that reports on the likely inconsistencies in a document without our even having to look at the files.

Computer-aided editing: Teamwork
Think of computer-aided editing as teamwork – you and the computer working together, each playing to your own strengths, with a single aim: to improve communication between author and reader.

A computer brings the following to the team:

• It can work tirelessly
• It is consistent
• It is very fast 

On  the downside, it lacks the ability to look beyond the data. It has no idea of meaning, significance, attitude, feelings – only humans can provide that.

Mechanics versus meaning
Editors spend a lot of time eliminating inconsistencies in the following:
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• spelling errors
• proper nouns
• headings 
• hyphenation
• formatting issues
• figure, table and box captions
• capitalization
• references and citations

This is the mechanical side of editing.

Editors also spend a lot of time focusing on meaning. It matters little how consistent a document is if the meaning is clouded. Obscure the meaning, and communication between the author and reader is impeded.

Using macros and related applications enables the editor to delegate some of the mechanical work to the computer – those mundane data-led tasks – and focus their minds on communication.

A possible workflow
Here’s one way it might look:

Here are the macros you might use in that workflow:
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1. To gain an overview, use the Alyse macros.
2. To make and record style decisions, combine the client’s brief with your understanding of the overview in (1).
3. To manage the mechanics, FRedit is one option (my preferred), combined with other global macros. Find out more about what FRedit is and how it works via my free book or this video: FRedit for beginners.
4. To manage the meaning and flow, use a range of line-editing macros to speed up the micro-level changes.
5. To double-check after the line edit, rerun some of the Alyse macros to catch previously missed inconsistencies or newly introduced ones.

If you’re a PerfectIt user (see the Intelligent Editing website), you could use that instead at stages (3) and (5). Or continue to use FRedit for (3) but use PerfectIt for (5). 

The latter is a possible best-of-both-worlds approach if you like the idea of having two different tools, each working to spot errors that the other might have missed.

False positives
False positives are to be expected with any computer tool. We can reduce them by refining the FRedit changes list and PerfectIt’s style sheets. 

For best effect with global change macros, apply them to one chapter at a time, making adjustments that will make it more effective in succeeding chapters.
 
Summing up
To access all my line-level and analysis macros, download the free book. You can also watch almost 100 video tutorials on my YouTube channel. And if you want to know more about PerfectIt, visit the Intelligent Editing website.

Please feel free to email me with suggestions and/or questions about macros.

In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise offer some quick tips on formatting your Word file ... final tidy-ups to get your file in shape, and that accord with mainstream publishing standards. And there's a free PDF that includes all the search strings we talk about (or try to)!

​Click to listen to Season 2, Episode 6

​Click on the image below to download the free booklet and grab all those search strings we try to explain!

Editing bites

• Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word: Amazon UK and Amazon US
• Word Tips​

​Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise talk about 10 editing macros that will save you time and improve the quality of your writing.

​Click to listen to Season 2, Episode 5

Summary
Listen to find out more about:

• Macros how they work in Word
• CatchPhrase
• CitationLister and CitationListChecker
• CompareWordList
• File Cleaner
• FullPointInDialogue and CommaInDialogue
• MultiSwitch
• PerfectIt
• ProperNounAlyse
• SpellingErrorLister
• VisibleTrack

Editing bites

• ​‘Advanced Find and Replace for Microsoft Word’: Available from Jack Lyon
• ‘20-Minute Macro Course’: Available from Tech Tools for Writers​
  

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License.

In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise talk with Daniel Heuman, founder of Intelligent Editing and developer of PerfectIt – consistency-checking and style-enforcing software for editors and writers.

​Click to listen to Season 2, Episode 3

Summary
Listen to find out more about:

• What PerfectIt does
• Who uses PerfectIt
• What’s new with PerfectIt 4
• Using the onboard styles
• The PerfectIt 4 interface
• How to access PerfectIt on PC and Mac
• How much a subscription costs and what’s included
• Where to download PerfectIt​

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​Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

In this episode of The Editing Podcast, Denise and Louise discuss the order of play for the different levels of editing, and some ideas about how you can keep costs down.

Click to listen to Episode 9

Summary of Episode 9
Listen to find out more about:

• The different levels of editing
• The order of play – when to do what
• Who else can help – beyond the pro editor
• Planning ahead
• Getting comparative quotations for the job
• Honing story craft
• Manuscript critiques or evaluations
• Learning through example – commissioning mini edits
• Word’s onboard tools, macros and add-ins
• Style sheets

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Editing bites

• PerfectIt (consistency-checking software)
• Proofreading checklist (free PDF booklet, available when you sign up to The Editorial Letter)
• Ask A Book Editor (Facebook group)

Other resources

• Author resources library
  
• A nifty little proofreading and editing macro: ProperNounAlyse (blog post)
• Creating your own style sheet (scroll to bottom of blog post)
• Free downloadable style-sheet template (scroll to bottom of blog post)
• How do I find spelling inconsistencies when proofreading and editing? TextSTAT (blog post)
• How Not to Write a Novel (Howard Mittelmark and Sandra Newman)
• Self-editing your fiction in Word: How to use styles (video tutorial)
• Should a writer hire a freelance editor before submitting to an agent? And should editors accept the work? (blog post)
• The different levels of editing: Proofreading and beyond (blog post)
• The Magic of Fiction (Beth Hill)
• Using proofreading macros: Highlighting confusables with CompareWordList (blog post)
• Write to be Published (Nicola Morgan)​

Music credit
‘Vivacity’ Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com). Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0 License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

PerfectIt is the premier consistency-checking software for many professional editors and proofreaders around the world. Developer Daniel Heuman and I sat down for a chat about what's new!

So Daniel was in New York, and I was in a tiny hamlet in Norfolk called Panxworth. Despite the 6,000 miles between us, the construction works going on outside his apartment, and the internet-connection problems in my somewhat rural neck of the woods, we managed to produce a video of our chinwag!

​For those of you who want to jump to specific parts of the conversation, here are the key themes and associated time stamps:

​▶️ Louise introduces Daniel Heuman, developer of PerfectIt: 00:00:00
▶️ What PerfectIt does and why it’s useful: 00:00:24
▶️ PerfectIt Cloud – the new solution for Mac users: 00:04:08
▶️ Windows users: Should we buy PerfectIt Cloud?: 00:06:12
▶️ The subscription model and a new lower price: 00:09:27
▶️ The benefits of up-to-date editing kit: Stability and support: 00:12:27
▶️ PerfectIt and Office 2016: 00:14:54
▶️ PerfectIt 4: Online, in the cloud, or both? 00:18:35
▶️ Features of PerfectIt 4: 00:20:24
▶️ Sign-off: 00:25:44

​And below is the conversation in full. Click on the Play button to begin listening. I've included subtitles in case you need to turn the sound off or can't understand our British accents!

There's a full transcript below. I've edited this for readability but essentially it's the words as they were spoken on the day.

THE VIDEO

​THE FULL TRANSCRIPT

Louise introduces Daniel Heuman
LH: My name is Louise Harnby and I’m a fiction editor, and today I’m going to be talking to the founder of Intelligent Editing and the developer of a piece of software beloved by many editors all over the world. And that’s PerfectIt.
 
Before Daniel and I start chatting about all the PerfectIt news, Daniel’s going to tell us a little bit about what PerfectIt does, because some of you might not know. So over to you Daniel!

What PerfectIt does and why it’s useful
DH: Thank you! It’s lovely to speak to you! This is very exciting. I don’t know that they’ve ever done a video interview like this before so thank you! OK. PerfectIt – for the people who have not come across it before (which is probably exactly who won’t be watching this, but hopefully they are!)
 
LH: You never know!
 
DH: You never know! Exactly! So PerfectIt is mostly consistency-checking software, and the key place where it comes in is that when you’re editing work it’s almost always under, you know, time pressure, and with a pressure to produce perfect work.
 
It’s ultimately dealing with the fact that everything is going to be on a budget. So given a limited time, what is the best document you can produce? And PerfectIt really fits in there. It saves time; it helps you edit faster.
 
And the way I was trying to explain it the other day was at the ACES conference. I have new way of explaining it ... I thought a little bit about what gets people into editing. And I think that without delving into the deep psychology of what makes anyone an editor, I think one of the things that does not drive people is the difference between tiny consistency mistakes.
 
So, yes, it’s fun sometimes when you spot ‘e-mail’ with a hyphen in one place and not in another but mostly that’s not what’s driving people. People get into editing because you care about words, you like reading, you care about communication, you want to explain stories, you want to help people connect better with readers.
 
And these little tiny mistakes that take so much time to spot are not the reason. They are a distraction. They’re significant because they jump out at readers but they’re not the reason why we get into this. And they’re certainly not the reason why one should be spending a lot of time on a document.
 
LH: And you’re so right because they take so long to deal with. I’ve had manuscripts before where, actually, particularly if an author’s got a budget, people like me are spending perhaps hours and hours and hours when we’re using just our eyes, dealing with these tiny inconsistencies, which as you say are red flags.
 
And, yet, actually what we want to do is immerse ourselves in the narrative in front of us and to make it better. And the more time we can spend focusing on the flow of the words ... because every time you come across a hyphen that’s inconsistent, or inconsistent capitalization, as an editor, you’re dragged out of the flow of the work as well.
 
And so being able to do that, to save time by having a piece of software like PerfectIt to do that for you is just wonderful. And you still get the pleasure of knowing that you’re bringing this consistency to the work. But it is back-breaking doing that manually. I think that’s the thing that a lot of editors feel. It’s just back-breaking work.
 
And I would rather an author paid me to do other things with my time. I want them to feel that I’m going to do those things but I don’t want to have to spend more time than necessary doing it, and that’s where your software comes in.
 
DH: Absolutely, and we put on the homepage something like: you spend the time on what matters most, which is your words and their meaning.
 
LH: Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly it.

PerfectIt Cloud – the solution for Mac user
LH: So, Daniel, in the past, PerfectIt’s only been available to Windows users.
 
Well, that’s not quite true. I do have Mac-using friends who have been able to use PerfectIt but they have to be running something like Parallels, or I think it’s called VM Fusion Ware or something. Or they’ve had to go buy a cheap Windows laptop.
 
So I suppose that’s the thing that everybody’s talking about. Like, what’s new for Mac users?
 
DH: That is the news! So first off, it’s been touching and amazing, the extent to which people have been going to use PerfectIt.
 
Like you say, they’ve been installing Parallels. People have been buying computers to run this program, which is touching. I know that buying another computer doesn’t cost as much as it used to but, still. But for Mac users who hate Windows and just run it for one program has been phenomenal to see. But yes, no longer!
 
So we are producing PerfectIt Cloud, which is ... you’re going to have to forgive ... in the background you can probably hear the construction noise! I’ll do my best to speak over it. So we’re producing PerfectIt Cloud, which is an Office Store add-in.
 
And the great thing about Office Store add-ins is that they are compatible in any version of Office 2016. So if you are on a Mac, if you’re on a PC, if you’re on an iPad, even in Word Online (which I don’t know that anyone actually uses), no matter which version you’re on, you see the same add-in. So the functionality is exactly the same across.
 
And we’ve been developing this for ... I mean, you know, the amount of times people have heard me saying, ‘A Mac version is coming soon. It’s just a few months. It’s just a few months.’
 
But, no, as of 26 June we will have PerfectIt Cloud, which brings compatibility to Mac and to iPad for the very first time. So it’s really exciting!

Windows users: Should we buy PerfectIt Cloud?
LH: So what about Windows users? I have PerfectIt 3. I’ve had all the versions since it first launched. I work on a PC. Should I rush out and get PerfectIt Cloud?
 
DH: In a word, no. So the introduction of PerfectIt Cloud is primarily for Mac and iPad users at this stage. So if you’re using PerfectIt 3, if you’ve got a Windows PC, that’s still going to be the best version that we offer.
 
And it’s going to be strange because PerfectIt Cloud looks so much better! The interface is even easier than it was before. It’s a beautiful product, but underneath there are a few things that PerfectIt 3 can do that we haven’t been able to do for Cloud yet.
 
So the most important one of those is customization of styles. That’s still going to take some time to bring into PerfectIt Cloud. The ability to check footnotes – we’re going to be dependent on Microsoft for them to make some changes before we can bring that in.
 
So if you have PerfectIt 3, if you have a PC, in most cases the thing to do is not to rush out, and not to buy this at least until we produce a new version for the PC, which will be PerfectIt 4.
 
There’s one exception, which is, you know, all those people who ... the ones, the amazing wonderful users that you’ve described who have gone and bought VMware, and Parallels, and even separate computers.
 
A bunch of those users are really frustrated with having to turn them on every time, and going through Windows updates, which take forever. And just to get PerfectIt up and running takes two hours. And it’s saving them a lot of time so they do it, but if you’re one of those people who has both a PC and a Mac, in those cases, yes, you would.
 
Not all the options are included but it’s close enough that you may not want to be uploading and updating your Windows computer each time just to run PerfectIt.
 
LH: Yeah, and I suppose also for people perhaps who are, I don’t know ... I was thinking about the increasing number of editors who are location-independent. And, actually, maybe they don’t always have the latest ... you know, they’re don't want to be worried if their computers break ... and the idea perhaps of just knowing that it doesn’t matter which PC you’re on, or which Mac you’re on, that if you’ve got something, a machine in front of you, you can do your work and you can access the core functionality of PerfectIt wherever you are.
 
And that’s an important thing, I guess. I mean, I’m not location- independent. I am very much dependent! I’m in Norfolk with a rubbish broadband speed and so I’m kind of quite keen to keep things offline and local when I can. But knowing that I’ve got the choice – that will be a big issue for me.

The subscription model and a new lower price
LH: Can we talk about price now? Because in the past, once every two or three years, you bring out a new version, and I’ve paid you, I don’t know, $90? I can’t remember the price off the top of my head. So that’s the way it’s worked. But you’re doing things slightly differently now, aren’t you?
 
DH: Yes. So we are switching to a subscription ... sort of a subscription.
 
And I know the minute I use that word people are turning off this video, don’t want to know anything more. because everyone is sick to death of subscriptions with, you know, Netflix and Amazon, and, oh my God, you can get a subscription for your vegetable delivery now, which is bonkers!
 
But I think what we’re doing is really different to that. We switched to a once-a-year payment. At this point at least, there’s no handover-your-credit- card or anything like that. You pay each year if you want to continue using it.
 
And switching to that kind of model means we can drop the price by a lot. So instead of being a $99 one-off purchase, we’ve made it $70 per year.
 
And on top of that, we’ve really dropped the price for, you know, independent editors. So we’ve worked with as many of the editing societies around the world as we can – certainly all the big ones – to have a kind of a discount.
 
And that’s going to be an additional 30%, so the price is going to be just $49 per year for independent editors who are, you know, a member of any of the big editing societies anywhere in the world.
 
So subscriptions mean we can get down the price down a lot, and they mean we can create a really compelling, simple offer, which is that you will buy PerfectIt and then you will get any version you want on any number of devices you want, and not pay a separate charge, which I think is really what bothers a lot of people.
 
So you buy PerfectIt and you can install the PC version on your PC, you can install the Cloud version on your iPad. You only pay once for that and you don’t get stuck with that additional charge you described, which was the upgrade charge.
 
So, yes, we used to have a one-off price but people liked this product and much more than 60% of people paid the upgrade price anyway. So, really, there was a hidden recurring element.
 
And by switching to ... we can call it a subscription, we’ve made everything included in that price very transparent. And you get all the upgrades, you get all the updates, you get support. So I think the way we’ve switched the pricing is really gonna be attractive, and especially attractive for independent editors.
 
The benefits of up-to-date editing kit: Stability and support
LH: I think it’s wonderful because, I mean, I’m a big fan of the subscription model, even with things like Microsoft Office, because I’m a professional, I want the latest software, and I want it to work in an environment that’s stable as well. And so I like having the most up-to-date version of Word.
 
I had a situation a few years back when I first plonked a download of Windows 10 on my Windows 8, or Windows 7 computer or something, and I was trying to get PerfectIt to operate in an environment basically with two operating systems, and guess what? It wasn’t happy.
 
And so at that point ... because PerfectIt was key to my editorial day-to-day working, it was one of the things that triggered me to actually think, ‘You know what? You need to get yourself an up-to-date computer with the latest operating system already installed, so it's not fighting with anything else.’
 
And to know now that I’m always going to be running the latest edition of Word on the latest operating system and that the plugins that fit into that software, like PerfectIt, are going to be the latest editions too ... for me, that’s just one less worry.
 
It means that I can get on doing the business of editing rather than thinking, ‘I want to be able to do X, Y or Z but I can’t because it’s broken.’
 
And so I’m really excited about this because, as you say, it’s upfront, it’s clear, everybody knows what they’re gonna pay and what they’re getting.
 
And you mentioned something there as well, and that was the issue of support. Because in days past, it was the case that if you decided to stick with an older version of PerfectIt you wouldn’t have access to you.
 
And sometimes, you know when you get stuck on things, you just want to be able to ask the person who actually really knows the answer. It’s not guesswork. And knowing that that’s always going to be ... you get the full package. So I’m really excited about it. I think it’s a really good deal.
 
I think the price is a steal as well. And for those of us who are members of professional societies, what a perk of membership to know that you can get one of your core pieces of editing software at such a huge discount! Thank you!
 
DH: Yeah, those societies and the editors within them are absolutely the reason why we are where we are today. That’s been the core of this business so now I absolutely think that it’s important to support them.
 
PerfectIt and Office 2016
DH: And I agree with you completely about thinking about Office and updates that way.
 
I know that a lot of editors have been disappointed when we’ve said that PerfectIt Cloud is only gonna work in Office 2016. And they said, ‘Well, I’m never moving to Office 2016 because I’ve heard all these terrible things about it.’
 
And I just wonder every time I hear that ... I think, I know those stories are true – when you have a piece of software like Microsoft that is installed everywhere then you always are going to have some things that don’t work and that are gonna get on Facebook. And they’re gonna look to seek help. And they’re always going to be the ones who have some kind of problem.
 
You never get someone who installs the latest version of Microsoft and says, ‘Yep, that worked’ and tells all their friends.
 
So our perception of these versions has been really sort of distorted by, I think, the relatively lower number of people who have had problems in perspective to the total, in relation to total.
 
And as you say, when you actually look at the package and what Microsoft are offering, I think it’s really good. And I’m fortunate that I’ve never had any sort of problems with it. I’ve used Word on the iPad, I use Word on the PC. I think they’ve done a really good job of making those two similar and in line. In the past, there’s been big differences between those things.
 
You know, I was able to switch as a long-time PC-user to the iPad version. I had no trouble doing that. And they do it at a low monthly price. And what I’ve sort of been saying to anyone who’s asked about it is something like, yes, there are some users who’ve had problems, and there have doubtless been lots of glitches, and there always are with endless Microsoft updates, but what about trying it for one month? They offer a monthly price. And see if it works for you.
 
And you’ve got your old version and you can always go back, but those old versions, they’re at this point ... you know, Microsoft has stopped supporting Office 2011 anyway, so we’re out of that period really.
 
Yeah, I think I think as you say, the package they’re offering is very good, and especially the kind of value in the monthly offer. It makes a lot of sense.
 
LH: Yeah, and I think the other thing to mention is that, you know, I think sometimes there are people in, well, not just the editing community but all sorts of communities who are trying to run say 2016, or with all the updates, 2018 software but on decade-old computers.
 
And that’s a bit like taking your mobile phone to medieval times and complaining you haven’t got signal!
 
You know, we need as editors to be, I think, working with the latest equipment. Within a budget, of course. Most of us aren’t rich. But I always think, get the best RAM you can ... get the best processor you can for your money.
 
And then things like PerfectIt, within Word, within Microsoft Office, will work the best for you.
 
DH: Absolutely! And we all make these mistakes! I’ve been screaming at my printer all morning and pressing over and over again, and wasting so much time trying to get this printer to work.
 
And I know the reason why it doesn’t work – it’s because it’s really old, and would cost next to nothing to replace.
 
But, you know, we’re old enough to remember that these things used to be very expensive, and it’s so difficult to get rid of them. But, actually, you know, when running a business, to spend my morning yelling at a printer is probably not the best use of my time!
 
PerfectIt 4: Online, in the cloud, or both?
LH: So can I just check something with you? Can we talk then about the next version of PerfectIt that will be also usable locally?
 
So we’ve got PerfectIt Cloud but there’ll come a point I’m assuming when there’ll be the next version, like PerfectIt 4 that will be in the cloud. Will that also be something that someone like me who’s got a little bit of an iffy broadband connection can, if they want to, download to their computer?
 
DH: Oh, so we are NOT moving to the cloud in any way, shape or form. We’re doing very much that kind of approach that Microsoft has gone for where you pay once and you have different parallel versions for different devices.
 
We are not switching to the cloud. There will always be a local version. As I said earlier, it’s still kind of the best version for a number of reasons.
 
And so at the moment, if you get a subscription, you will get PerfectIt 3 and PerfectIt Cloud, and as of the end of this year you’ll get PerfectIt 4 and PerfectIt Cloud.
 
And we’ll keep the two in parallel so that they’re running off ultimately the same code, so that you’ll get the update for PerfectIt 4 locally, and at the same time, almost at the same time, we will update PerfectIt Cloud automatically, and they’ll offer the same checking.
 
LH: OK, great, that’s good. I just wanted to be sure of that because ... just because my broadband is a bit of a nightmare here!
 
DH: No, no, I don’t think we communicated that properly in our in our literature so it’s a really good question to ask. I’m sure a lot of people will be concerned about that.
 
Features of PerfectIt 4
LH: So can we talk about ... do you have any specific plans for what will be new with PerfectIt 4 yet, or can we suggest things?
 
DH: Well, obviously, I’m going to dodge that question because the trouble with that question is that if I start saying we’ve got plans for PerfectIt 4, that we’re working on ... I suspect if I start saying the things that I’m working on, the disappointment that will follow when we say we’ve failed ... [laughing].
 
But I like the idea of suggestions. As I said, this business has very much been built by support from editors, and feedback from editors.
 
So if we wind the clock like all the way back to the first time that I was at SfEP conference, I remember someone mentioning en dashes and and why they could be in the hyphenation-consistency check.
 
And let’s let’s be honest, at that point, which was been ten years ago or so, I didn’t understand the significance of that. Why would we need to be looking for en dashes and hyphenation? What’s the point?
 
And actually it was that feedback which we then took on. And it got quite a few people explaining and saying, well, actually, this is the error that we’re looking for. This is what comes up. It’s really difficult to spot because of this. Is there anything you can do?
 
And I think it was in PerfectIt 2 but certainly in PerfectIt 3. And we’ve built in an en dash versus spaced-hyphen consistency check.
 
LH: And em dashes too.
 
DH: Yes, the way we do the checking for those is a little different but, yeah, it ultimately came down to the same reason, which is editors suggesting that these were the things that they wanted to see.
 
And I’d love to get those suggestions for PerfectIt 4. So, particularly ...
 
LH: I’m thinking legal and medical might be obvious.
 
DH: Yes, legal. I’ve got a long, long list of changes that we want to make for legal, but medical, pharmaceutical scientific ... I know we have a lot of editors working in those kinds of fields and I feel like we haven’t done as much for them as we should and could.
 
So I’d love to get suggestions from every kind of editor, but especially those ones would be really good, because we need to do more in that area.
 
LH: And speaking as a fiction editor as well, I think there are certain functions I’m using ... the possibilities are there but there are certainly things I could think of in terms of the similar-word-find function that maybe even we could put forward some suggestions that might help you to push that stuff further forward, and help us to adapt the style sheets more so that we could get more benefits in that field too.
 
And I’ll certainly be thinking if there’s anything else from a fiction point of view that I can push your way.
 
DH: Definitely. You know, we always get a nonfiction writer saying, ‘Can this be used for nonfiction too?’ We get fiction writers saying, ‘Can it be used for fiction?’ And we hadn’t been quite communicated clear enough that, yes, it’s for all of those things.
 
And, yeah, the similar-words function. Lots of people are using that for character names. Can we improve that? Can we make it clearer that that’s a possibility for character names? Can we look and see if there are ways of improving that?
 
And already you have got me talking about features that I swore just two seconds ago I wouldn’t get into! Some of those things people are really gonna be telling me, ‘But you promised, but you promised!’
 
I will avoid saying more about that but I am excited by that kind of change and by doing things that are specific to different kinds of editing, for sure.
 
LH: I think from my point of view as an editor, and for people who are watching this who haven’t tried PerfectIt yet, knowing that you’re responsive to ways in which you can develop the software is a really important thing to emphasize, because the various iterations that I’ve used over the years have just got better and better. And that means I’ve saved more and more time.

And so I want to say to people that when you invest in this software you are working with a company and a business owner who will listen to you, and that's a good thing.
 
DH: Thank you! And my guess is that at this point in the video, between the dogs barking outside and the helicopter going overhead, anyone who is completely new to this software will probably have stopped watching 20 minutes ago!
 
But, yes, anyone with us longer hopefully has experienced that we are ... it’s actually the other way around. It’s editors who’ve helped build this and made all this stuff possible, so we are absolutely listening, and will continue to iterate and improve.
 
If we improve the product for actual editors, everyone else who uses the software benefits. And, you know, we really have the best people in the world advising us, so I think it’s fantastic.

Sign-off
LH: Daniel, thanks very much! That’s been really, really useful. So I’m excited about ... not just the cloud but also PerfectIt 4 coming out. I’m excited that I’m going to be able to use it on multiple platforms, in different spaces. I’m excited that I’m going to be able to get it cheaper than I did last year!
 
So thanks for taking the time to talk to me. It’s been brilliant.
 
DH: Thank you! And thank you for all the support through all the years.
 
The excitement and enthusiasm is so encouraging after we’ve been telling people, you know, soon, soon just another month, just another couple of months. Now that it’s done, now this here, it’s fantastic! Thank you.

Louise Harnby is a fiction copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in helping self-publishing writers prepare their novels for market.
​
She is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors, and runs online courses from within the Craft Your Editorial Fingerprint series. She is also an Advanced Professional Member of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders. Louise loves books, coffee and craft gin, though not always in that order.

​Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader & Copyeditor, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

If you're an author, take a look at Louise’s Writing Library and access her latest self-publishing resources, all of which are free and available instantly.

Here's a treat for PerfectIt users ... a custom style sheet that includes the find-and-replace strings in my free ebook, Formatting in Word.

If Formatting in Word has made your life easier, you'll love what my colleague Andrea Kay of Yours Truleigh Editing has done. Yep, she's upped the efficiency game for all of us by creating a custom style sheet that can be imported into PerfectIt.

Thank you so much, Andrea!

For those unfamiliar with either the software or the booklet, I've provided an overview of both, and the benefits of importing the style sheet.

Below that are the installation instructions and the ready-to-download files for Formatting in Word.

​How to import your style sheet
Importing the style sheet is a doddle, I promise, Follow the instructions and screenshots below. If PerfectIt is already installed, the process will take no longer than 20 seconds.

1. First, email me to get the style sheet.

2. Once you've installed PerfectIt, open the Word document you want to check.
3. Launch PerfectIt.
​4. Click on Manage Styles.

5. Click on the Import button.

6. Select the pft from your device and click OK.

7. Click OK in the Manage Styles window.

8. Select the your pft from the Current Style drop-down box.

9. To run PerfectIt on your current Word document using the custom style sheet, press Start.

If you're not a PerfectIt user ...
If you're not yet ready to invest in PerfectIt but still want access to the find-and-replace strings and other tools in the ebook, click on the image below.

​If you’re an editor, making Word work hard for you is a must. The new and revised edition of Editing in Word 2016 is one of my recommended resources. Here's why.

I’m a fiction editor who works solely for indie authors and self-publishers. I work on raw-text files, and Microsoft Word is one piece of software that I cannot afford to be without.

Word has its snafus but I don’t know of any word-processing software that comes close to offering its superb functionality. I don’t just edit in Word; I’ve also created print- and digital-ready books directly in it.

So when fellow editor and author Adrienne Montgomerie asked me to review the second edition of Editing in Word 2016, I couldn’t wait to get stuck in. I’ve been using Word since 1991, so could Montgomerie teach this old dog a few new tricks? How about younger pups?
​
Let’s see ...

More than an ebook
This is a digital self-study course. Yes, you get the ebook with all the contextual information and foundational teaching. But there are also videos that show Word in action, and a bunch of exercises with which to practise what you learn at each stage of the process.

I love the fact that the advice is actionable. You read, you see, you learn, and then you do. There’s no better way to ensure it’s all sunk in.

A focus on core tools

We certainly do. Here are some of the tools that Montgomerie focuses on:

• Track Changes
• Comments
• Spellchecking
• Formatting
• Find and replace
• Styles
• Readability stats
• The equation editor
• Macros – creating, editing, running and using
• Recommended add-ins, plug-ins and apps

If you don’t know 8 out of 10 of the above tools inside out, you’re likely not as efficient or productive as you could be. That alone makes this course a worthy purchase.

That it’s a steal at just under 25 quid (excluding VAT) makes it a no-brainer.

​Let’s dig a little deeper ...

Screens, operating systems and how we work with Word
One of the best things about this course is its acknowledgement that editors work in different ways.

• I like Windows; you like a Mac. No problem.
• I like a ribbon/mouse combo; you like keyboard shortcuts; and he likes Mac menus. All those preferences are incorporated into the instructions.

Top tips
This course is rammed with useful and actionable tips on how to get stuff done and in ways that respect your preferences. For example:

• Pre-editing file preparation
• Different ways to do things: for example, running a macro or using keyboard-shortcuts instead
• Customizing your onscreen work space
• Incorporating additional plug-ins and apps into Word that will make editing even more efficient

And along the way, Montgomerie includes ‘Pro tips’, ‘Read more’ and ‘Troubleshooting’ callouts to keep you on track.

Video demos
I’m a big fan of multimedia learning. And when it comes to editing, sometimes just hearing your tutor’s voice and watching them go through the motions onscreen can trump the written word.

In addition to the ebook, there's a support website with 27 video tutorials for both Mac and Windows users.

This feature is excellent. I’ve come across a lot of editors who’d like to enhance their digital skills but are held back through fear. Montgomerie takes the stress away via accessible walkthroughs that even the most tech-nervous of nellies will be able to follow.

Here are just 3 examples:

• How to record a macro
• Installing an existing third-party macro
• Setting up autocorrect preferences

Practice makes perfect
There are 24 exercises in this course that help you to hone your skills and start doing what’s written in the book and shown in the videos.

Just a few examples include:

• Using autocorrect
• Locking Track Changes
• Language selection
• Comparing documents
• Customizing Word’s ribbon

A note on versions
This course was created in 2017 using Word 365 on Windows 10 and Sierra OS. Given that the author’s using the latest software and operating systems, you might find that the instructions need a little tweaking here and there if you’re using medieval Word (or should that be Wordeth?)!

For example, older versions of Word might have different ribbon displays, icons and menu options.

That’s unavoidable, and a reminder that, as professionals, we should be aspiring to use up-to-date equipment. I’d prefer my dentist not to fill my teeth with 10-year-old composites; we should treat our clients similarly.

My verdict
Did I learn anything new? Yes, I did. But editorial training isn’t just about finding out what you don’t know; it’s also great for affirmation of what you do know. I was pleased to learn from a pro that a lot of my Word usage is on track.

Here’s another thing, though: there are functions in Word that I use infrequently (e.g. erasing time stamps). I know it’s possible but I’ve simply forgotten how.

​And instead of trawling Google or spending valuable time asking questions in editing forums, I can have Editing in Word open on my desktop. From there, I can search, locate and solve my problem in seconds.

I recommend this without reservation for any editor who wants to get the very best from Word with a one-stop shop, especially those who've been held back by fear. Montgomerie will take that away from you – I promise.

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.

If you think there's no place for macros in fiction editing, think again. My friend Paul Beverley has collated a core group of macros that will have any fiction line editor, copyeditor or proofreader drooling! Self-publishing authors will love them too!

I don't use all of these (every editor has their preferences) but some of them are staples and save me oodles of time! 

Some of the macros apply when you’re looking at the whole text of a novel, while others are selective ... for use while you’re editing line by line. Bear in mind that they're designed to be used with MS Word files.

Macros that work with the whole text
These macros are ideal near the beginning of the edit, when you’ve put together the whole book in one single file, and you want to look for inconsistencies.

ProperNounAlyse searches the novel for any words that look like proper nouns; it counts their frequency, and then tries to locate, by using a variety of tests, and pairs of names that might possibly be alternative spellings or misspellings, e.g. Jayne/Jane, Beverley/Beverly, Neiman/Nieman, Grosman/Grosmann etc.

FullNameAlyse is similar to ProperNounAlyse, but it searches for multi-part names, Fred Smith, Burt Fry, etc.

ChronologyChecker is aimed at tracing the chronology of a novel. It extracts, into a separate file, all the paragraphs containing appropriate chronology-type words: Monday, Wednesday, Fri, Sat, April, June, 1958, 2017, etc. This file is then more easily searchable to look at the significance of the text for the chronology.

WordsPhrasesInContext tracks the occurrence of specific names through a novel. You give it a list of names/words/phrases, and it searches for any paragraphs in the novel that contain them. It creates a separate file of those paragraphs, with the searched element highlighted in your choice of colour.

CatchPhrase searches your novel for over-used phrases and counts how many times each phrase occurs.
​

Macros for when editing line by line
FullPoint/Comma/Semicolon/Colon/Dash/QuestionMark/ExclamationMark
These macros change
he said, you know ...
into he said. You know ... 
​or he said: you know ...
​or he said – you know ...
and so on.

FullPointInDialogue and CommaInDialogue
These two macros change
“Blah, blah.” He said.
into “Blah, blah,” he said.
and vice versa.

ProperToPronoun
This macro looks along the line to find the next proper noun, deletes it and types ‘she’. But if you then type Ctrl-Z, it changes it back to ‘he’.

MultiSwitch
You give this macro a list of changes that you might want to implement:
Jane
Jayne

Beverley
Beverly

that
which

which
that

When you click in a word, and run the macro, it finds your alternate and replaces it. It also works with phrases and can also provide a menu of alternates:

he said
he opined
he shouted
he voiced

she said
she opined
she shouted
she voiced

To access the macro scripts, download Paul's book.

Macro Chat is back! This is where I hand over the Parlour reins to my friend, macro king Paul Beverley. A lot has happened since March: Paul's written lots more macros (close on 600 now) and has created another couple of dozen screencasts, 45 in all (see the Resources at the bottom of the blog for more on that). So over to Paul ...

​What can macros do for you?
More and more people are taking a deep breath and loading their first macro tool. (I say ‘macro tool’ to differentiate my pre-programmed macros from those that you can record for yourself.)

But why bother? What can macros do for you?

'I’m a proofreader – is there any point?'
Most definitely! The better view you can get of the (in)consistency within your document before you start reading, the more problems you’ll be able to spot as you read through.

Did the client pass on the editor’s style sheet? Maybe, but anyway, you can easily analyse your document to find the predominant conventions and get a count of the exceptions:

• HyphenAlyse gives you a full list (and frequency) of hyphenated words as one word/two words/hyphenated.
• ProperNounAlyse alerts you to possible misspellings such as Brown/Browne, Rachael/Rachel, Henry/Herny, giving the frequency of each – especially useful for fiction.
• DocAlyse checks a whole range of different punctuation, spelling and capitalisation issues.
• SpellingErrorLister lists all the words that Word thinks are spelling errors (you might know better, e.g. technical words).
• SpellingErrorHighlighter, after you’ve removed the OK words from the list, highlights the remaining words, so you can check them.

'I’m an editor, but do I need 600 macros?'
Absolutely not! Indeed, that’s part of the problem, knowing where to start. (Sorry!) But if I suggest a possible general strategy, maybe that will help.

1. Analyse the text, just as a proofreader would, but there’ll be lots more inconsistency in the text at this earlier stage.
2. Use these analyses, plus the brief (I wish!), plus your knowledge of the principles of editing, to prepare a style sheet. (For a sample style sheet, see Appendix 5 of my book.)
3. Read the text and make the changes, in line with the style sheet. (Being realistic, some items in the sheet will need adjusting as you get into the detail of the actual text.)

Fine! Except that (3) is a massive over-simplification. Let’s dig a bit deeper, and see how a macro-aided editor might work.

FRedit – the powerhouse
The principle I use (for books, anyway) is that I make as many changes as I can globally, but I do it chapter by chapter. I do a number of global find and replaces (F&Rs) on chapter 1, but I keep a list of them, so that I can do the same ones again on chapter 2 as well, and I don’t forget any of them.

But hang on! Couldn’t you get the computer to go through that list and do all those F&Rs for you? Absolutely, and that’s what FRedit does! And it doesn’t just do the F&Rs, it allows you to add a font colour or a highlight to each and every F&R, and/or to track change (or not) each one – do you really want to track change all those two-space-to-one-space changes?

But isn’t global F&R dangerous, especially when you can do a whole string of F&Rs at the touch of a button? Definitely, so start with just a few F&Rs and build up confidence; but if you colour or track all the changes, you’ll be able to see, when you read chapter 1, any inadvised F&Rs, so you can remove them or refine them.

To give an example, if you changed every ‘etc’ into ‘etc.’ you’d get ‘ketc.hup’, ‘fetc.h’, etc.. (sic)! So use a wildcard F&R: Find: ‘<etc>([!.])’ Repl: ‘etc.\1’ (without those quotes, of course). And you don’t even need to work out those wildcard F&Rs yourself – just look in the library of F&Rs (provided free with FRedit) and gain from other people’s wildcard expertise.

As you refine your F&R list, chapter by chapter, more of the dross is sorted out before you read, so (a) you miss fewer mistakes (as there are fewer to find, as you read) and (b) you can concentrate more on the meaning and flow of each sentence and (c) the job is more interesting, involving fewer boring tasks.

Enjoy!

Resources

• Download Paul's free book: Macros for Editors (and proofreaders!) 
• Access Paul's free powerhouse macro: FRedit
• Subscribe to Paul's YouTube channel (currently over 45 video tutorials)

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.

Another email from a reader. The answer will be of interest to anyone with similar manual dexterity issues, and who is considering a career as an proofreader.

Rachel asks:

‘I am looking into a career in proofreading. I have multiple sclerosis and need to work from home. I was wondering if you know whether any of the online courses cover the use of things such as Track Changes. Unfortunately, I have lost almost all manual dexterity and am unable to mark up on hard copy. I am, however, able to use a keyboard and mouse comfortably.’

Thanks so much for your question, Rachel.

So the good news is that because you can use a keyboard and mouse, and you therefore prefer to work onscreen, professional proofreading is certainly a viable option for you (assuming your spelling, grammar, and punctuation are up to scratch, and you're ready to market your business effectively).

Furthermore, there are industry-recognized training courses and resources that will support your onscreen learning.

One thing we need to look at is how different client types’ expectations of what proofreading entails present challenges for you.

It’s important to me that you’re forewarned about this so that you can target your clients appropriately, and communicate your service offering in a way that makes it clear what you will and won’t do.

I’ll tackle that issue first and then move on to the training options available.

Proofreading – expectations and possible challenges
So, you’ve told me that your MS affects your manual dexterity, but my first thought was whether it also leads to fatigue. You didn’t mention this in your email, but I think it’s worth discussing for reasons that I hope will become clear.

In my first decade of proofreading practice, almost all of my clients were mainstream publishers. Now I work exclusively with self-publishers (a few businesses but primarily writers of fiction).

What’s clear from my experience is that the expectations of what has to be done and how it has to be done often differ depending on client type.

Furthermore, how much will be done by the proofreader is often (though not always) quite different.

What and how much does a proofreader do? Traditional publishers
When working for traditional publishers, a proofreader is usually annotating designed page proofs. These are the pages (either paper or digital) that are almost identical to what readers would see if they pulled a book off the shelf.

It’s a quality-control check of a book that’s been through developmental-, line- and copy-editing. The author has reviewed the files at each stage. Once the team is happy that the book’s ready to be laid out, an interior designer or typesetter will format the book to professional, industry-recognized standards.

The proofreader’s job is to find anything missed during an extensive copy-edit, that no errors have been introduced at design stage, and that the various elements of the book are rendered consistently, correctly, and according to the design brief.

In this case, the proofreader is looking at more than just spelling, punctuation and grammar. She’s also spotting problems with page numbering, chapter headings, line spacing, paragraph indentation, running heads, image captions, table and figure numbering, widows and orphans, page depth, prelims and end matter, and more.

In my experience, because most of the problems in the text have already been attended to during previous rounds of editing, there might be only a few changes that warrant querying or marking up on each page.

Of course, there are always exceptions to the rule, but, on the whole, most of a proofreader’s time is spent carefully reading and checking rather than marking up.
That’s important for you because while your hand movement is somewhat impaired, your vision isn’t.

And because you wouldn’t have to make thousands of changes, the strain on your hands wouldn’t be excessive or challenging.

What and how much does a proofreader do? Non-publishers
Outside of the mainstream publishing industry, things become a little more tangled. The role of the proofreader is not nearly so well defined.

It’s not unusual for clients to ask for a service they call ‘proofreading’ but that a traditional publisher would call ‘copy-editing or even ‘line editing’. Here the raw text is amended (or suggested recasts to the text are made using Word’s commenting tool).

Furthermore, it’s not unusual for the so-called proofreader to be the first professional to work on the text.

And that means that the changes made might well run into the thousands. We’re not talking about a few amendments on each page, but hundreds per chapter, perhaps even per several pages.
​
Of course, it does vary, but every change, every query, requires the use of one’s hands. So you need to be aware of the potential impact of this kind of work on your health, and think carefully about how it will affect your hands and your fatigue levels.

I’m not saying that working for non-publishers isn’t an option for you. Rather, you’ll need to take your speed and fatigue levels into account and factor them into the time you assign to complete projects.

If you're working in Word, I suspect that =2K–10K-word business documents, Master’s dissertations, journal articles, short stories, brochures and newsletters won't present you with the same challenges as book-length work of 80K–100K words will.

How does a proofreader mark up? Traditional publishers
Because the proofreader is usually providing a pre-publication quality-control check on designed page proofs, most publishers like the annotations to take the form of industry-recognized proof-correction marks. In the UK, these are BS 5261C:2005.

Any decent professional training course will teach you how to use these appropriately.

Traditionally, these annotations were made on paper but publishers are increasingly providing PDF proofs.

This affords you an opportunity because you can use a keyboard and mouse to annotate the page proofs in a way that mirrors a paper markup. There are a few options, but many proofreaders use a combination of a PDF editor’s (e.g. Adobe Reader DC, Acrobat Pro, or PDF-XChange) onboard comment and markup tools and digital proofreading symbols (custom stamps).

I supply free files of stamps that proofreaders can download and install in the stamp palettes of their PDF editors. These stamps conform to BS 5261C:2005.
 
How does a proofreader mark up? Non-publishers
Because many non-publishers supply Word files, you’ll be working directly in Word and using Track Changes.

You’ll also be able to take advantage of several macro suites and find/replace strings that will improve your efficiency and reduce the strain on your wrists and fingers.

That’s good news for all of us – with or without MS or other manual-dexterity issues – in terms of time, quality and consistency.

Summary of what, how, and how much
So, all in all, it’s worth your taking the time to think about the types of clients you’ll work for, how many changes you might be required to make, how those client types will expect you to mark up, what length the projects will be, how long it will take you to complete the different project types, and how all of those things fit in with your specific health condition.

Professional training
My two recommended online proofreading training providers in the UK are the Society for Editors and Proofreaders and The Publishing Training Centre.

The SfEP has practical online courses on the technical aspects of professional proofreading, a grammar brush-up course, and editing in Word. Of the latter, the SfEP says, ‘It includes chapters on styles and templates, find & replace and wildcards, and macros. Guest chapters have been written by Paul Beverley on FRedit, Daniel Heuman on PerfectIt and Jack Lyon on The Editorium. All chapters contain downloadable study notes, exercises and model answers.’

The PTC offers a grammar course, and its flagship Basic Proofreading course.
Before you sign up, I’d recommend you have a conversation with either or both organizations in order to assure yourself that the course materials are usable in a way that suits your needs.

Additionally, there are numerous free online tutorials and screencasts on how to use Word’s Track Changes, so Google will be your friend here. Search for one that matches your own version of Word.

The most important issue for any professional proofreader is understanding first what to change, and making sure that she and the client are on the same page, figuratively speaking, about what degree of intervention is expected and how it will be rendered.

Online books and resources
Here are some resources that should help you on your journey:

• My favourite punctuation guide is R.L. Trask’s Penguin Guide to Punctuation – straight to the point, lots of easy-to-understand examples, logically organized, and short! If you can manage print, there’s a paperback on Amazon.
• If you need an online version, try this guide by the same author, and available free online via the University of Sussex: Guide to Punctuation.
• New Hart’s Rules online: If you’re a UK library member, you can access the premium version of Oxford Dictionaries, which includes NHR and a number of other excellent online grammar and style resources. I like it because it’s easier to search than the paper version, but you’ll benefit from the fact that you can access its content using a keyboard and mouse. You'll need your library card number.
• The Chicago Manual of Style: There’s a searchable online version of this too. Great for all the same reasons as NHR!
• Jack Lyon’s Wildcard Cookbook for Microsoft Word is brilliant for helping the complete novice learn how to use wildcards to save time when editing/proofreading Word docs. It’s a small book, but, again, if the print version’s going to impede access, then use Google Search. Try, for example, Graham Mayor’s Find and Replace using Wildcards.
• Check out the myriad macros on Jack’s The Editorium, too.
• PerfectIt is a simply gorgeous Word add-in that, in my opinion, is a must-have for any professional editor or proofreader working in Word. There are lots of tutorials on the developer’s website.
• Rich Adin’s EditTools is also popular with non-fiction Word editors and proofreaders.
• ​And let’s not forget the mountain of macros available via Paul Beverley – do check these out; they’re all free!
• Finally, for a tiny but excellent summary of BS 5261C:2005 proof-correction marks, visit the SfEP website. There are freebies online but they’re not always up to date. This is still, for me, the best and cheapest reference guide to the marks. It comes as a sturdy piece of folded card, so I’m hoping it won’t be a challenge for your hands.

I hope this helps you move forward, Rachel, and wish you all the very best in your search for a career that will work for you alongside your MS rather than in opposition to it.

Good luck!

Further reading

• Not all proofreading is the same: Part 1. Working with page proofs (Louise Harnby)
• Not all proofreading is the same: Part 2. Working directly in Word (Louise Harnby)
• PDF Editing – Making the Most of the Stamps Tool​ (Louise Harnby)
• Does Training Matter? What Publishers Say about Proofreading & Editing Courses (Louise Harnby; The Proofreader’s Parlour)
• The Proofreader’s Corner: Page Proofs and the Domino Effect (Louise Harnby; An American Editor)
• Proofreading Practice: Exercises with model answers and commentary, 2nd ed. (contact Margaret Aherne direct)

Louise Harnby is a line editor, copyeditor and proofreader who specializes in working with crime, mystery, suspense and thriller writers.

She is an Advanced Professional Member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), a member of ACES, a Partner Member of The Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi), and co-hosts The Editing Podcast.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Fiction Editor & Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, connect via Facebook and LinkedIn, and check out her books and courses.

If you’re an editor or proofreader who’s never once switched off Track Changes (TC) in the middle of an edit and then forgotten to toggle it back on again, congratulations – you’re a rare creature indeed!

​I’m not rare. I’ve done it several times. If you’re like me, you know that sinking feeling – that you’re going to have to go back to where you stopped tracking and redo the work. I've come close to weeping when this has happened. It’s a waste of  precious, precious time, pure and simple!

​Until recently, my solution consisted of frequently double-checking whether TC was on or off. No big deal, you might think. After all, it’s easy enough to take your eye up to the TC button on the Review tab and see whether it’s greyed out – only a tenth of a second. But those tenths add up.

Furthermore, I’m not billing my clients for my attention to the TC button; I’m billing them for proofreading and editing. I should be focusing on the text, not distracting myself with checking that TC is on.

I could work with ‘All Markup’ (or ‘Final Showing Markup’ in earlier versions of Word) showing, but that’s just another distraction. I want my eyes and brain to focus on what my client has written, not what I’ve amended.

Paul Beverley, naturally, has the solution. It’s a macro called VisibleTrackOff4 and it’s amazing!

Even if you don’t like macros, don’t use macros, are wary of macros, this is one macro that you should consider installing anyway. Trust me. It's a lifesaver.

By the end of this article, you’ll know how to ensure you never forget you’ve switched off Track Changes. I’ll show you the following:

• How it works
• How to install it
• How to run it efficiently
• Alternative versions with different formatting options

How it works 
In brief, VisibleTrackOff4 is an alternative TC on/off switch. You run this macro instead of using Word’s TC button.
​
I work in Windows 10 with Word 2016. On my screen, the TC button is accessible via the ribbon in the Review tab. Your view may be slightly different.

When you use VisibleTrackOff4 (rather than the TC button shown above) to switch on TC, your page appears white, as usual. However, when you use it to switch off TC, your page turns yellow. As you toggle TC on and off, your page colour toggles too. If the page is yellow, you know TC is off. That’s something you can’t miss, and that’s why it’s foolproof.

To use the macro efficiently, you can do one of the following:

• Create a shortcut key
• Add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar
• Create a custom button in your ribbon (Word version 2010 onwards)

I’ll show you how to do all three in the ‘How to run it efficiently’ section below.

How to install it
Here’s how to install the macro:

• Download Paul’s book from his website, Archive Publications
• Open TheMacros.doc
• Search for VisibleTrackOff4
• Select and copy the script, including the title ‘Sub VisibleTrackOff4()’, right down to and including ‘End Sub’
• Open the ‘View’ tab on Word’s ribbon
• Click on the ‘Macros’ button

• A window will open (with the header ‘Macros’). Click on the ‘Step Into’ button
• This will open Visual Basic. In this will be another window (with the header ‘Normal – NewMacros (Code)’. Use the scroll bar on the right to go to the bottom. If you need help installing a macro for the first time, see ‘Another useful proofreading/editing macro: Paul Beverley’s MultiSwitch’
• Click under the last line of text
• Paste the macro script that you copied earlier
• Close Visual Basic using the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner

• Click ‘OK’ if you get the message ‘This command will stop the debugger’

How to run it efficiently
To switch TC on and off efficiently using VisibleTrackOff4, you can do one of the following:

• Create a shortcut key
• Add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar
• Create a custom button in your ribbon (Word version 2010 onwards)

Create a shortcut key

• Right-click anywhere on the ribbon
• Select ‘Customize the Ribbon’, or ‘Customize Quick Access Toolbar’, depending on your software
• Click on the ‘Customize…’ button at the bottom 

• Under ‘Categories’, select ‘Macros’
• Go to the right-hand ‘Macros’ column. Scroll down and select VisibleTrackOff4
• Type in your preferred shortcut key
• Click on the ‘Assign’ button followed by the ‘Close’ button

Add the macro to your Quick Access Toolbar

• Right-click anywhere on the ribbon
• Select ‘Customize Quick Access Toolbar’
• From the drop-down ‘Choose commands from:’ box, choose ‘Macros’
• Scroll down to find the macro and click on it
• Click on the ‘Add’ button followed by the ‘OK’ button
  

​This is what your new button will look like:

Create a custom button in your ribbon (Word version 2010 onwards) 

• Right-click anywhere on the ribbon
• Select ‘Customize the Ribbon’
• Look to the right-hand column
• Scroll down and click on ‘Review’
• Click on the subentry ‘Tracking’
• Click the ‘New Group’ button
• Now look to the left-hand column
• From the drop-down ‘Choose commands from:’ box, choose ‘Macros’
• Scroll down to find the macro and click on it to select it
• Go back to the right-hand column and click on ‘New Group (Custom)’
• Click the ‘Add’ button followed by the ‘OK’ button

This is what your new button will look like:

Other versions
You don’t have to go for the yellow-page effect. Paul’s provided other options. The installation and quick-access instructions are the same; only the script you’ll need to copy and paste is different:

• VisibleTrackOff – embossed effect
• VisibleTrackOff2 – blue dotted underline
• VisibleTrackOff3 – wiggly lines
• TrackOnOffAudible – beeps

​
Summing up
I prefer the yellow-page effect because it’s so obvious, and because it doesn’t interfere with my view of the text while I’m amending with TC off.

I also prefer to run the macro with a custom ribbon-based button because it’s right up there alongside Word’s TC button, which is what I’m used to. I’ve created a shortcut key so that I have choice in the matter. This comes in handy when I need regular access to the Styles tab and don’t want to keep switching the tabs on the ribbon.

I urge you to try this macro. Remember, you need never again endure the frustration of having forgotten to switch on Track Changes! 

P.S. My colleague Adrienne Montgomerie was single-handedly responsible for showing me how easy it is to customize the ribbon so that you can easily and quickly access any command. Her article ‘Make a Custom Tab on Word’s Ribbon’ is a must-read if you want to increase your onscreen efficiency.

And, as always, thanks to Paul Beverley for creating some brilliant macros, and for giving me permission to bang on about them via my blog!

MultiSwitch is another gem of created by my colleague Paul Beverley. This useful little macro speeds up onscreen editing and proofreading.

The macro is available in his free book, Computer Tools for Editors. In a nutshell, it allows you to switch around a word (or words) with a single keyboard shortcut. I use it to save time with every single Word-based project I work on.

Imagine that you’re editing or proofreading a Word file in which the author repeatedly uses ‘which’ for restrictive relative clauses. You want to change it to ‘that’. This means carrying out three small actions: select, delete and retype.

That’s not a problem if the issue occurs twice in a file, but if it occurs tens or hundreds of times, those seconds are going to add up and eat into your hourly rate. And let’s not get started on the ache in your wrist!
 
Naturally, you might notice that a particular job has a number of similar niggles that you want to attend to, in which case this macro will be even more of a productivity-enhancer.
 
Give it a whirl!

MultiSwitch in action
To run MultiSwitch, you simply place your cursor before or in the word you want to change (in our example here, ‘which’), and hit your keyboard shortcut (I’ve assigned alt-3, but you can choose whatever you like). Then, bingo, the macro amends ‘which’ to ‘that’.

Here's a teeny-tiny video of me using MultiSwitch. This demo aims merely to show you where to place the cursor prior to hitting your assigned shortcut key command, and what you will see on your screen (a little flickering as the macro makes the switch). 

​If you don’t know how to assign a keyboard shortcut, don’t worry – I’ll show you how later in the article. 

The beauty of MultiSwitch is that you need only one keyboard shortcut for a ton of different word switches. Here are a few examples from my switch list: 

• that – which
• which – that
• last – past
• like – such as
• less – fewer
• will not – won't
• is not – isn't
• he is – he's
• they will – they'll

I love this macro for editing fiction because it's so quick to create contractions when I'm helping the author create a more informal narrative, or dialogue that's closer to natural speech.

Further down, I explain how to create your list – it's a doddle. Or, if you'd like to save even more time, grab a free copy of my contraction switch list. You can edit it to include your own word switches.

Installing MultiSwitch
Go to Paul’s website and download Computer Tools for Editors.

Save the zipped folder to your computer and extract three files: one is an overview of the macros – what they are, what they do, how to store them and so on – plus all the programs themselves; another contains just the actual macro programs; a third is called ‘Beginners Start Here’; and the final file is a style sheet. The file you need to open in Word is ‘The Macros’.

Use Word’s navigation menu on a Mac (or Ctrl F on a PC) to open the Find function. Type ‘Sub MultiSwitch’ into the search field and hit ‘Return’ twice. That will take you to the start of the relevant script.

Select and copy the script from ‘Sub MultiSwitch()’ down to ‘End Sub’.

Still working in Word, open the ‘View’ tab and click on the ‘Macros’ icon on the ribbon:  

A new window will open.

If you don’t have any macros already loaded:

• Create a test macro that you can delete later.
  
• First, make sure the ‘Normal.dotm’ template is showing in the ‘Macros in:’ box.
  
• Type ‘TEST’ into the ‘Macro name:’ box.
  
• Click on the ‘Create’ button.
  
• Your TEST macro will now show up. From now on, it’ll be easy as pie to add additional macros.
  

If you already have macros loaded (your TEST macro or any other):

• Click on ‘Edit’.

​​
This will open up another window:

• If necessary, use the scroll bar to take you to the bottom of the text.
• Paste the MultiSwitch script at the end, under ‘End Sub’.

Don’t close this Visual Basic window quite yet – there’s something else you need to do first!

Creating your MultiSwitch list
Now head over to Word. Open a new document and call it zzSwitchList. 

Create your list using the following style:

that
which

which
that

last
past

like
such as

less
fewer

Less
Fewer

it is
it's

Save it somewhere just as meaningful! Mine’s in my Macros folder, but you can save it wherever it suits you. Now close the document.

You can amend this list any time you want to – just add or delete words as you see fit.

Changing the MultiSwitch script
Now you're going to make a small amendment to the macro script so that it's personalized for you, so go back to the window into which you pasted the MultiSwitch script.

At the top of the script, you’ll see the following:

​The text in red shows how I’ve customized the script to suit my needs – you need to put in your own location.

Now you can close the window by clicking on the ‘X’ in the top right-hand corner. Do the same with the general Visual Basic window too. Don’t worry if you get a message about a debugger – just press ‘OK’.

Creating the keyboard shortcut for running MultiSwitch
If you don't know how to create keyboard shortcuts, this section's for you. If you do know how to do this, you don't need to read any further!

I'm working in Word 2016 on a PC. If you are too, the instructions are as follows:

• In Word, select ‘File’, ‘Options’, ‘Customize Ribbon’ (1). 
• Click on ‘Customize’ (2). A new box will open up entitled ‘Customize Keyboard’.
• In the ‘Categories:’ window (3), scroll down and select ‘Macros’.
• In the ‘Macros’ window (4), select ‘MultiSwitch’.
• Finally, choose your preferred keyboard combination by typing it into the ‘Press New Shortcut Key’ window (5).
• Select ‘Assign’ and ‘Close’.

​(If you are working in a different version of Word, see pp. 14–15 of the ‘ComputerTools4Eds’ file in the Macros folder that you've downloaded from Paul’s site in order to install this macro. There, he provides details of the process for different versions of the software.)

The image below shows how I assigned a keyboard shortcut to another macro called ‘UndoHighlight’. The steps are exactly the same.

That's it! I hope this macro saves you as much time as it's saving me!

Every writer, copy-editor and proofreader comes across words that are used correctly but spelled incorrectly (typos), but we also have to look out for words that are spelled correctly but used incorrectly – this is the world of confusables.

What are confusables?
Some confusables are not only spelled differently, they sound very different too, e.g. imply/infer; militate/mitigate; reactionary/reactive. In this case, the writer might have misunderstood the meaning.

​Some confusables are homophones – words that are spelled differently but sound the same, e.g. rein/reign; stationary/stationery; prophecy/prophesy; loath/loathe. In this case, the writer understands the different meanings, but is unsure of the appropriate spelling.

Then there are errors that are simply a result of hands moving too fast over a keyboard – the meanings and correct spellings are known to the writer, but, in their haste, perhaps they’ve transposed a couple of letters or omitted a character.

​Or it may be that the automatic spellcheck has kicked into gear and the writer hasn’t noticed the problem because they’re concentrating on the bigger picture. Examples might include e.g. filed/field; adverse/averse; pubic/public.

Blind spots
Writers aren't the only ones with blind spots. Editorial pros do too. It’s our job to spot these problems and fix them. However, we’re only human and most of us have a few blind-spot words that our eyes are, on occasion, less likely to notice, even though we do know the differences in meaning and spelling.

My own blind spots are gaffe/gaff, brake/break and peek/pique/peak. I don’t know why my eye doesn’t spot these pesky confusables as readily, especially when the likes of compliment/complement or stationary/stationery scream at me from the page! However, I accept that I do have blind spots and have taken steps to ameliorate the problem with a little mechanical help – the macro.

How can macros help?
Using macros enables us to identify possible problems before we get down to the business of actually reading, line by line, for sense.

Every time we find an error, we have to think about it and decide whether to amend. By reducing the number of interruptions, we can focus our attention on the flow of the words in front of us and increase efficiency.

For this reason, I, like many of my colleagues, run my macros at the beginning of a project (though I often repeat the process at the end stage too).

What’s on offer in the world of confusables?
There are several free macros available to the copy-editor or proofreader who wants to tackle confusables with efficiency. See, for example, the excellent “A Macro for Commonly Confused Words” published by C.K. MacLeod on Tech Tools for Writers (updated July 2015).

Another option, and the one that I’m currently using, is the CompareWordList macro created by Allen Wyatt on WordTips. See “Highlight Words from a List” (updated July 2015). 

As some of you will already know, Wyatt has two WordTips sites; the one you use will be determined by which version of Word you’re running.

The linked article above will take readers to the article written for MS Word 2007, 2010 and above. If you are working with an older version of Word, you’ll need to follow Wyatt’s links to the sister site.
 
Why I’m using Wyatt’s CompareWordList
CompareWordList is currently my preferred tool simply because of how easy it is to create and update my own list of words to be checked – words that can, on occasion, be blind spots for me.

As I’ll show below, customizing the list of confusables doesn’t require me to amend the script of the macro once it’s installed. Instead, all I have to do is amend a basic list in a Word document – nice and simple!

Using CompareWordList 1: Create your list of confusables
The first thing to do is to create a list of the words you want the macro to find, and highlight, in a Word document.

• Simply open up a new Word document, give it a name (I called mine “confusables”), and save it in your preferred folder (I chose to save it in my Macros folder, but you can save yours wherever you want).
• Make a note of the location of your document (for example, mine is in c:\Users\Louise\Dropbox\Macros\confusables.docx).

For speed, and so you can see the basic format of the list, you can download a copy of a list here. If you want to rename it, do so. Then add words, or remove them, as you see fit.

Using CompareWordList 2: Get, and tweak, the code
Visit “Highlight Words from a List” and copy the code. If you’re completely new to installing macros, just paste the script in a Word document for now so that you can tweak it easily.

​Below is a screenshot of Wyatt's code. The highlighted sections show where I’ve tweaked the code to suit my own needs.

Tweaks to consider
(1)  I’ve changed Wyatt's code (as per his suggestion) so that it describes where my list of confusables is located: sCheckDoc = "c:\Users\Louise\Dropbox\Macros\confusables.docx". You’ll use the location you made a note of when you created your own list (see the section above – Using CompareWordList 1: Create your list of confusables).

(2) Wyatt's code emboldens the words found by the macro; I wanted them highlighted so I replaced the highlighted text as follows: .Replacement.Highlight = True.

(3) I changed the Match Whole Word instruction to False because I wanted the macro to find part words. This, of course, will pull up some false positives but it was the easiest solution I could find.

(4) I also changed the Match Case instruction to False.

Now that you’ve tweaked the code to suit your own needs, you’re ready to install it (the basic, step-by-step instructions below are provided for the benefit of those who are completely new to macro installation).
​
Using CompareWordList 3: Install the code
With Word open, open the “View” tab and click on the “Macros” icon on the ribbon.

This will open up a new window.

If you don’t have any macros already loaded:

• To get you going, create a test macro that you can delete later.
• First, make sure the Normal.dotm template is showing in the "Macros in:” box.
• Type TEST into the “Macro name:” box.
• Click on the “Create”. Your TEST macro will now show up. From now on, it’ll be easy as pie to add additional macros.

If you have macros loaded (your TEST macro or any other):

• Click on “Edit”.

This will open up a further window:

• If necessary, use the scroll bar to take you to the bottom of the text.
• Paste the CompareWordList script at the end, under “End Sub”
• Close the window using the X in the top right-hand corner.

The installation is now complete.

Running CompareWordList

• Open the Word file in which you want to locate potential confusbles.
• Click the “View” tab.
• Click the “Macros” icon on the ribbon.
• Select "CompareWordList" from the list.
• Click “Run”.

Removing highlights one by one
Here’s a tiny macro that I recorded to remove a highlight as I move through a Word document. Installing this means I simply have to click on a highlighted word and run the macro.

Assigning a shortcut button (see below) makes the job easy and efficient. I decided on Alt H because I don’t have that keyboard shortcut assigned to any function that I carry out regularly.
​
Sub UndoHighlight()
'
' UndoHighlight Macro
'
'
    Options.DefaultHighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
    Selection.Range.HighlightColorIndex = wdNoHighlight
End Sub

To install: Simply copy the red script above and install it in the same way that you installed the CompareWordList macro.

To create a shortcut key: In Word, select File, Options, Customize Ribbon (1). Click on Customize (2). A new box will open up entitled “Customize keyboard”. In the Categories window (3), scroll down and select Macros. In the Macros window (4), select UndoHighlight. Finally, choose your preferred keyboard combination by typing it into the Press New Shortcut Key window (5). Select Assign and Close.

To remove ALL highlighting in one go: For this job, Paul Beverley’s your man. A huge number of macros are available in his free book, Computer Tools for Editors (available on his website at Archive Publications).

Hope you find this useful!

"Not responding" ... do you sometimes see this message at the top of a Word window when it’s running a long macro? If so, you don’t need to panic.
 
When a macro is running, if it’s taking rather a long time (according to Microsoft), Word displays a warning message in the title bar of the window – "Not responding" – and the screen display freezes. Actually, the macro hasn’t stopped working; it’s just that the macro is using up so much processing time that the computer’s operating system decides it hasn’t got time to update the screen display – well, not until the macro finishes.
 
The user’s natural response at this point is to click on the screen – just to check if Word is still working. Definitely don’t do that! By clicking on the screen you’re trying to force Word to update the screen display, and that takes up even more processor time. This can then cause Word to crash altogether. [You did save that file before running the macro, didn’t you?!]
 
So what should you do? Be patient. Make a cup of tea. Take the dog for a walk.

Good news ...
But there’s some good news, especially for users of my macros. I’ve discovered a new (to me) command (DoEvents) that I can put in my programs; it makes the macro stop for a fraction of a second and this allows the computer to update the screen.
 
I won’t say that “Not responding" will be a thing of the past, but if you use the latest (8 November or later) versions of my macros you’ll still be able to see onscreen that something is still going on. More importantly, you will be able to see the prompts that the macro puts on the status bar down at the bottom of the window to show its progress.
 
A final tip ...
One final bit of advice still remains. For running macros that use lots of computer time, do try the macro out first with a more modest-sized document – a few thousand words – and not on your magnum opus 150,000-word book.

Get the improved versions ...
Improved versions of FRedit, HyphenAlyse, DocAlyse, ProperNounAlyse, SpellingToolkit, WordPairAlyse, etc. are available by downloading my free macro book here: 

If you proofread or copyedit fiction or non-fiction, or you're self-editing your own books, here's a macro that will highlight potential inconsistencies in proper-noun usage.

I've been meaning to review some of my favourite proofreading macros for a while now and ProperNounAlyse deserves its first place in the queue (only because it performed so brilliantly on a recent proofreading project!).

ProperNounAlyse is just one tool among many, of course. Those of us who use macros on a regular basis have a whole suite of them that we run during the process of a proofread or a copy-edit.

ProperNounAlyse was created by my colleague Paul Beverley, and it’s just one of a huge number of macros available in his free book, Computer Tools for Editors (available on his website at Archive Publications).

I've written this post for the person who doesn't use macros and is nervous about trying. I think it’s such a shame when a fear of tech leads to lost opportunities for those who want to increase productivity (which is great for the editorial pro) and improve quality (which is great for the client).

Why bother? Three reasons

1. ProperNounAlyse is easy to install, even for those with absolutely no technical savvy, and quick to run.
2. It’s great for picking up inconsistencies in proper nouns (even double words, e.g. Louise Harnby vs Louise Hornby) while allowing you to maintain complete control over the text. This is because it’s not changing anything in the document you’re working on; rather, it works through the text in a Word document and provides a summary analysis of what it finds. That leaves you free to identify what needs sorting and what needs leaving well enough alone. I find it particularly useful when I'm proofreading fiction with lots of characters whose names may inadvertently end up being spelled slightly differently. A writer can become so immersed in the story they’re building that these kinds of slippages are easily missed. And even the best professional proofreader is only human, so using a little bit of simple tech to complement the eyes and brain makes good sense.
3. While you’ll find it useful for paid work, it’s also a sharp little tool for providing insight into the state of a file you’re being asked to quote for. One of my colleagues routinely runs this in conjunction with another couple of macros in order to get an overview of the author’s consistency. I've taken a leaf out of her book and started using ProperNounAlyse in this way too.
   
   

Installing ProperNounAlyse
Go to Paul’s website and download Computer Tools for Editors.

Save the zipped folder to your computer and extract three files: One is an overview of the macros – what they are, what they do, how to store them and so on – plus all the programs themselves; another contains just the actual macro programs; and the final file is a style sheet. The file you need to open in Word is “The Macros”.

Use Word’s navigation menu (or Ctrl F on a PC) to open the Find function. Type “Sub ProperNounAlyse” into the search field and hit Return. That will take you to the start of the relevant script.

Select and copy the script from “Sub ProperNounAlyse()” down to “End Sub”. Paul’s helped us out by highlighting the name of each new macro.

Still with Word open, open the “View” tab and click on the “Macros” icon on the ribbon.

This will open up a new window.

If you don’t have any macros already loaded:

• To get you going, create a test macro that you can delete later.
• First, make sure the Normal.dotm template is showing in the "Macros in:” box.
• Type TEST into the “Macro name:” box.
• Click on “Create”. Your TEST macro will now show up. From now on, it’ll be easy as pie to add additional macros.

If you have macros loaded (your TEST macro or any other):

• Click on “Edit”.

This will open up another window:

• If necessary, use the scroll bar to take you to the bottom of the text.
• Paste the ProperNounAlyse script at the end, under “End Sub”.
• Close the window using the X in the top right-hand corner.

The installation is now complete.

Running ProperNounAlyse

• Open the Word file you want to analyse.
• Click the “View” tab.
• Click the “Macros” icon on the ribbon.
• Select "ProperNounAlyse" from the list.
• Click “Run”.

A fictive sample
Below is a simple word list of proper nouns with lots of inconsistencies – differences in accent use, apostrophe use and spelling.

I run ProperNounAlyse on the document. It analyses the text and then creates a new Word file with the following results:

I’m provided with an at-a-glance summary of potential problems that I need to check. It may be that the differences identified are not mistakes, but I know what to look for.

“I don’t need to use techie tools … my eyes are good enough”
Macros don’t get tired. Macros don’t get distracted. I don’t believe any proofreader who claims they can do as good a job with their eyes alone as they can do with their eyes and some electronic assistance. It’s a case of using these kinds of tools as well as, not instead of, the eyes and brain.

I could have relied on my eyes to find all of the above problems, and in a small file I would hope to have hit the mark 100%. But if I’d been working on 100,000 words of text, and there were twenty key characters, a plethora of grammatical glitches, two major plot holes, numerous layout problems, and a mixture of hundreds of other inconsistencies regarding hyphenation, capitalization, punctuation and regional spelling variation, there would have been a lot of problems to solve; I want to utilize every tool available to help me do that.

Yes, my eyes and brain are two of those tools. But using macros like ProperNounAlyse and others (PerfectIt, for example, just because it’s another favourite!) speeds me up, pure and simple, and massively reduces the chance of a miss.

I ran ProperNounAlyse on a recent fiction proofread for an independent author who is a phenomenally good writer – great plot, excellent pacing, engaging characters. But he was so busy crafting the 95,000 words it took to build a fantastic story that he’d introduced a lot of proper-noun inconsistencies. That’s fine – it’s not his job to deal with these; it’s mine. It took me minutes, rather than hours, to locate them and deal with them. And I know I found them – every one of them.
 
What will the client remember?
If you’re still reluctant to try out ProperNounAlyse (or any other editorial tool for that matter), consider this: What will the client remember? The three hundred mistakes that you spotted or the three howlers you missed?

​When it comes to proper nouns, especially in large volumes of character-based editorial work, it’s too easy to miss a discrepancy. And character names stand out to readers. Taking just a few minutes to run a simple-to-use macro might determine whether your client thinks your work was pretty good or outstanding.

Which of those is likely to gain you a repeat booking or a referral to another potential client?

I’ve recently posted links to a couple of overviews of PerfectIt, Version 3 of which was recently launched to the delight of regular users like myself.

I believe that user reviews can play an important part in helping others make the decision on whether a particular tool or piece of software is a wise investment.

However, the developer’s voice is invaluable too because no one knows the tool/software better.

With that in mind, I asked Daniel Heuman, Managing Director of Intelligent Editing and developer of PerfectIt, if he’d like to join me and the Parlour’s readers in a discussion about his proofreading software, and he graciously accepted.

The following relate to some comments I’ve made in the past, here on the blog, and more general issues about the software.

​Feel free to join in the discussion in the Comments below if you have something to add.

Daniel Heuman: Hi Louise. In the interest of generating discussion, I’ve got some questions for you about PerfectIt 3. You described one review of PerfectIt 3 as “robust”. I’m not sure I’d agree with you; below I’ve provided some questions and examples to help illustrate the issues.

But for now, I’m interested to know why you used this term, particularly since I think it may be holding you (and others) from reviewing Version 3 themselves.

Louise Harnby: You make a fair point, Daniel, though I used the word “robust” in quite a general sense to mean “uncompromising” rather than in the more academic sense that some might be used to.

You’re correct that I haven’t yet done a public detailed review of PerfectIt 3 myself (though I’m using the software on a regular basis), and if it seems like my links to other people’s reviews are a case of time-strapped piggy-backing on other people’s hard work, you’re not far wrong!

But this isn't the only reason: as a proofreader who specializes in working for publishers on hard copy and PDF, I’m rarely in a position to take advantage of PerfectIt’s full functionality – it simply isn’t apporpriate for the kind of intervention my clients require.

Having said that, I don’t think others should hold back on doing their own detailed exploration of the software, particularly given that you offer a try-before-you-buy option. [Readers, you can access the trial version here.]

DH: One review was entitled “Quality Software for the Experienced Editor”. Do you think someone needs to be an “experienced editor” to use PerfectIt?

What about editors who have completed training but are just starting out? What about non-editors with a good grasp of language?

LH: I don’t think someone needs to be an experienced editor (or proofreader or writer) to avail themselves of the benefits of PerfectIt.

I do, however, suspect that to maximize the full functionality of the software, one would need to be reasonably comfortable with using Word and its plugins.

It’s not that newbies can’t use PerfectIt – they can, and I think they should. Rather, I’ve come across many people in the international editorial community who are still nervous about using complementary tools to improve their efficiency and output quality.

I’m not just talking about PerfectIt, but a whole range of tools – from Word’s find/replace function, to both simple recorded macros and more complex scripted ones.

Having experience of using such tools gives one the confidence to experiment with their various features, and this in turn can have a really positive impact on one’s editorial business practice.

My feeling is that the review title in question was acknowledging that those editors, proofreaders and writers who do have this confidence will be able to maximize PerfecIt’s functionality, and given that the review was written by a very experienced editor, it’s understandable that the article was positioned in such a way.

DH: The reviews you’ve featured haven’t addressed in detail PerfectIt’s full functionality; rather, they’ve just looked at the new features in Version 3. Again, here I’d question the appropriateness of your using the term “robust”. Does not “robustness” require a fuller discussion?

LH: I think a robust, as in uncompromising, review could include details of only the new features. I think that a software review that addresses the challenges and benefits experienced by the user who writes the review can still be robust in its analysis.

Those of us in the blogosphere are always aware that our readers are time-limited, so when we’re sharing information about new (or revised) editorial tools, we want to focus on the most exciting elements of the product as we see them, and then help readers navigate to other resources (including the websites of the relevant developers) that will provide more detailed information.

DH: I’d like to address some of the issues that one of the reviews highlighted, just to reassure any potential new users who might have decided that PerfectIt 3 was too complex for them to use. 

• “[R]eading the help files for each test is necessary to make sure it’s doing what you think it is”.
  My response to this is: how many editors find that to be true? Have more than 5% of users ever looked at the help file? How many have looked at every description of every test?
• “PerfectIt doesn’t run in Word automatically. Before you can access the ribbon buttons, you have to click the far left ribbon button that says Launch PerfectIt.”
  To that, I’d ask: would anyone want PerfectIt running automatically all the time? Is this causing anyone else frustration?
• “Tests with Word 2003 were particularly fraught ... The ribbon got lost periodically, and my old custom style sheet wouldn’t run without giving an error message.”
  I think it’s important to point out that this is not the case for all users of Version 3. We need to remember that this review was done on a pre-release version of the software, so that bugs and glitches were still being ironed out. If anyone using the now released version is experiencing this problem, I’d like to know about it, though I’ve had no such feedback to date. (See <link> for how to access customer support.)
• The review is confused about serial commas. They appear among the list of best new features, and it states that PerfectIt will check consistency of them (which PerfectIt can’t do). Then it states there are lots of false positives and recommends increasing the maximum length of comma-separated clauses (which will increase the number of false positives). The nature of this test means that false positives are inevitable if you decide to turn it on. But are other users finding this test as confusing?
• “The customization options in PerfectIt 3 make it vastly superior to earlier versions, though they do add a deep layer of complexity for the user.”
  Are new users finding that to be the case? Since all the customization options are optional, are new users finding it easy to get started (perhaps even easier than before)?
• “You’ll need to spend time setting your preferences to make the most of this product — perhaps a lot of time.”
  I agree that spending time will help you get the most from the product. But is it right to say that you have to spend that time?

I’m tremendously grateful for the recent pre-release reviews of PerfectIt.

But I’d like to know about other people’s experiences, too, whether they are newbie users or old hands. What do they like best, what are they struggling with, what are they confused by, what works well, what benefits to their work flows have they noticed?

LH: So, readers, if you’ve recently had the chance to experiment with PerfectIt 3, and you’d like to share your experiences with others in the international editorial community, drop us a line in the Comments.

As Daniel said, you needn’t be an experienced user (or editorial freelancer for that matter). All input is welcome.

​It’s worth mentioning that there’s a LinkedIn discussion group, "PerfectIt Users", dedicated to getting the best out of PerfectIt – if you have questions about how to take advantage of the various functions but need a little friendly guidance, there are plenty of experienced users online who’ll be happy to chat with you and share their expertise!

To start the discussion, my personal favourite features (some of which are new to Version 3, and some of which have been available since PerfectIt was initially launched) are as follows:

• I like the fact that I can navigate straight to the software via the Windows ribbon, because it has its own tab
• The styles-management function is easier to access and edit
• The consistency checks regarding hyphenation/dashes, spelling and capitalization
• The double-space-removal function
• Missing closing brackets and punctuation checks
• The ability to customize style sheets for my own needs

So, how about you?

PerfectIt is one of my favourite pieces of editorial software – a set of mechanical "eyes" that enable me to increase my productivity, consistency and overall quality when proofreading. That means it's good news for me and for my clients.

Version 3 of this super software was recently launched. For an overview of what's new, visit the Intelligent Editing website, where all the additional features are explained by the developer.

I'd planned to review version 3 here on the Parlour, but I'm a great believer on not reinventing the wheel when someone's already done the donkey work! So when I read fellow PerfectIt user Adrienne Montgomerie's robust review of PerfectIt 3, it made more sense to push my readers in her direction. You can read the article in full here: PerfectIt 3: Quality Software for the Experienced Editor (The Editors' Weekly, the official blog of the EAC).

Montgomerie provides a useful overview of the best new features, points of confusion, points of frustration, and an overall verdict. Her final words? "PerfectIt will still save your bacon, can save you time and tends to make you look eagle-eyed. If you take the time to set up style sheets for repeat clients, you can free up your eyes for content issues and lingering style issues. I will definitely be taking the time to make the most of this add-in for my largest clients, and I’ll continue running it on all documents."

Louise Harnby is a professional proofreader and copyeditor. She curates The Proofreader's Parlour and is the author of several books on business planning and marketing for editors and proofreaders.

Visit her business website at Louise Harnby | Proofreader, say hello on Twitter at @LouiseHarnby, or connect via Facebook and LinkedIn.

With the release of version 2 of PerfectIt, it seemed the ideal time to put some questions to Daniel Heuman, managing director of Intelligent Editing. I've been a PerfectIt user for some years and I'm looking forward to upgrading to the new version. 

Visit the Intelligent Editing website for more information about PerfectIt. You might also like the PerfectIt User Forum, where you can ask questions, suggest improvements and download style sheets.

In the meantime, if you're open to complementing your editorial eye with useful ancillary tools, and want to learn a little more from the developer, read on ... 

Louise Harnby: For the benefit of those who’ve never used PerfectIt, Daniel, tell us a bit about what it does.

Daniel Heuman: PerfectIt is a consistency checker. Just as you have a spell checker for spelling, and a grammar checker for grammar, PerfectIt checks documents for consistency mistakes. For example, if you hyphenate "copy-editor" in one location in a document, it’s important to make sure that’s consistent throughout. So PerfectIt checks consistency of hyphenation, capitalization, abbreviations, numerals in sentences, list punctuation and many other things.

PerfectIt also helps check points of style. PerfectIt can be customized with house style preferences and used to check those. For example, one editor programmed PerfectIt to check WHO (World Health Organization) style and made that available to all users. Anyone wanting to check WHO style can just load up that stylesheet and PerfectIt will check for over 1600 preferences. From "hyponatraemia" (not "hyponatremia") to "corrigenda" (not "corrigendums"), that’s an invaluable resource to anyone working with the style.

Finally, PerfectIt helps tidy up documents. It checks that abbreviations are defined, that users haven’t left notes to themselves in text (e.g. "NB: insert figure here") and it can create a table of abbreviations (automatically locating all abbreviations and their definitions) in seconds.

LH: I was discussing all things business to a friend of mine who’s a marketing manager. He writes a lot of quite lengthy reports for internal and external use. I suggested PerfectIt to him and his response was: "I don’t see the need for something like that – there’s a spell check on my PC and I’ve got a good eye.” What would you say to him?

DH: I’d probably scream “oh-my-god-you-are-wasting-your-life!” Actually, that’s not true … I’m English, so I’d probably roll my eyes and walk away!

The truth is that there are two reasons why he should be using PerfectIt. The first is speed. How long does it take him to find one inconsistency? He needs to read through his entire text, locate each word that is capitalized and check/remember to capitalize that word throughout. Then he needs to do the same for hyphenation, abbreviations, heading case, and so much more. PerfectIt finds all of that in seconds. He really is wasting his life by doing it the long way.

The second reason for him to switch to PerfectIt is quality. PerfectIt helps users to really take pride in their work. It isn’t possible for the human brain to keep track of consistency once documents pass several thousand words. Some 80% of documents over 1000 words that are published online contain a capitalization inconsistency, and over 60% contain a hyphenation inconsistency (see The Top 10 Consistency Mistakes). Even if we restrict it to spelling, over 20% of documents over 1000 words that are published online contain a spelling inconsistency. There’s nothing a spell checker can do about that last category. The word "adviser" and "advisor" are both correct spellings. But if they appear in the same document, that’s an inconsistency. Some people won’t ever be convinced. But the stats are real. And as soon as they try PerfectIt, they get it.

LH: So PerfectIt’s not just for editors or proofreaders. It feels like you developed it with a much broader audience in mind …

DH: My background is in economics, and I started out as an economic consultant. Most of the tests that PerfectIt carries out are based on real world experience at that time. For example, we’d deliver reports for businesses and government, but at the end of each report we’d have to go through carefully and make sure that bullets were consistently capitalized and punctuated. We’d check that abbreviations were defined in their first instance, and that they were only defined once. So PerfectIt was designed very much for that market, with a focus on consultants, engineers, lawyers, and medical professionals.

It was only when PerfectIt was released that it was adopted by the editing community, translators and technical writers. In terms of overall revenue, the big companies are probably more significant. But in terms of volume, it’s the individual editors who have been most important. I stopped counting sales to members of the Society for Editors and Proofreaders after it reached 100. And the success is similar with other editing societies around the world. But it’s not just about volume. Editors are wonderful customers because they send feedback. Is there any group in the world better at spotting flaws in editing software? You better believe I get a lot emails with examples that PerfectIt has missed. The result is that we’re always improving the product based on the mails we get.

LH: I’ve been pleased to see that you email me and your other customers with updates every now and then. Can you tell us about the driving factors behind these updates? And if f I say to you, “I’d really like it if PerfectIt did X or Y”, might I expect to see my suggestion in future versions?

DH: Yes, we can’t include all suggestions, but we have a place on our user forum where customers can bounce around feedback for future versions. For the first three years, those updates have all been free. And the ones suggested by users include support for multiple style guides, and the system for dealing with tracked changes in documents.

After three years, PerfectIt 2.0 will be the first major version upgrade that users will have to pay for. PerfectIt has a permanent licence (no subscription fee or anything like that), so in order to justify people spending more money on it, we’ve had to load PerfectIt 2 with user requests and lots of other new features. In particular, we’ve added a "Back" button (possibly the most requested feature) and a system for generating reports on errors and on changes made, which is probably the second most requested feature.

LH: And what are the biggest challenges you’ve faced during development?

DH: The constant challenge is to choose between complexity and usability. The more features and tests we add to the product, the more complex it becomes. But what people love about PerfectIt is the ease of use. So we’re constantly trying to balance those two. With any new feature, the first question is: "Can we get the software to do that?" But the second question is: "Will it be easy for the user to understand?"

LH: Does PerfectIt work for customers outside the UK? Some of the North American or Pacific Rim readers may be wondering if they can use it.

DH: PerfectIt is international. It doesn't duplicate the functions of a spelling checker, but it will spot inconsistencies in language. So, for example, it won't correct "realise" or "realize". However, if "realise" and "realize" appear in the same document, that’s a consistency mistake. Whether you’re in Europe, North America or the Pacific Rim, a consistency mistake is still a consistency mistake.

LH: People are often concerned about buying software and then finding out that it doesn’t do what they hoped. Can you try it before you buy it?

DH: There is a free download on the website. Users can try it without giving any credit card details or other personal information. Just download it and run it on a document.

When they try it, most people get what the product is about in seconds. The only suggestion we make is that PerfectIt is intended for longer documents. There’s no point in trying it out on a paragraph of text because that won’t contain many inconsistencies. Try PerfectIt on a document that’s over 1,000 words. Or better yet, try it on a document that’s over 10,000 words. That’ll show you what it can do.

LH: What does the future look like at Intelligent Editing? Do you have any plans for additional software tools or plug-ins?

PerfectIt 2 took an enormous amount of development time and effort, so it might be a while before we start anything new. However, there are a few projects under consideration, so we’ll let you know when we’ve decided.

LH:  I often post on this blog about my favourite editorial tools. Aside, of course, from PerfectIt, what are your favourite tools and resources? Anything you like … software, books, online resources and social media.

DH:  My favourite free tool for writing and editing is ClipX. It modifies the clipboard so that it shows the last 25 items that were copied, no matter what program they were copied in. After using it, I can’t understand why anyone would choose to work without it.

It’s more for writing than for editing, but I think that Word’s "AutoCorrect" feature is underrated. Why write out the word ‘"necessary" when you can program AutoCorrect to spell the word in full when you type ‘"nry"? You can quickly build yourself up an entire vocabulary and save lots of time typing.

I’m also a really big fan of Jack Lyon’s Editorium macros. Jack has put a lot of thought into the documentation, and the result is a system that helps you to work a lot faster. People don’t believe that faster keystrokes and saving a second or two each time can make a difference. But they really do.

LH: And finally, tell us something that might surprise us!

DH: In my other life, I’m a swing dancer. That’s partner dancing to big band jazz and old-time blues … and nothing at all to do with editing!