Document-polishing tips & tools

This booklet provides independent authors and editors with guidance on how to tidy up a Word document. And it's completely free!

Even those with minimal experience of using Word will be able to follow the easy instructions in this toolkit.
​I'll show you how to use some simple macros, Word's find/replace tool and its wildcard-search function to deal with a number of problems, including:
  • ​Removing double spaces
  • Removing all rogue spaces at the beginning and end of paragraphs
  • Removing double line returns
  • Changing hyphens used as parentheses to dashes
  • Changing tabbed paragraph indents to proper line indents (using Word’s ‘Styles’)
  • Changing a hyphen in a number span
  • Finding lower-case letters at the beginning of paragraphs
  • Finding a paragraph that ends with no punctuation
  • Finding a full point followed by a lower-case letter
  • ​Changing date styles with wildcard searches
  • Running a confusables macro
  • Removing unnecessary spaces before or after punctuation