Whether you’re proofreading or doing a more substantive review, this printable checklist can help!

The professional standards do not require editors to do more than simple math, but they can check all the words, proportions, congruence with the body text, legibility, and more.

For instruction on image resolution, see my post on the ACES blog.

For more on the best use and common pitfalls of graphs and charts, check out the handy reference: Getting the Numbers Right.

For more on quality checking other types of visuals, see Right Angels and Polo Bears.

Image by 200 Degrees from Pixabay

AFair question! Look below to see two was to find this information for Windows and Mac environments.

On a Mac, the “Styles in use” button is obvious in the Styles pane. So is the “Styles guide” option (shown in the video).

Windows users have to dig a bit more to use either of these features. Watch the demo!

Windows demo

Thanks to writer Katie Chambers for sending in this question. As she attested, sometimes you have to tell Word twice!

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© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!

What are “Connected experiences”

This will change over time, as Microsoft adjusts and grows. Right now, Microsoft says that spelling and grammar checks are involved as well as the Immersive Reader and Read Aloud functions.

“With Editor, for example, when you check the spelling of a word, that word and some of the words before and after that word is sent to Microsoft. No more than five words are sent at a time. If you’re checking grammar or style, one sentence at a time is sent to the Microsoft service that is designed to perform this task.” (source)

“Machine learning” is used for these tools in Editor. That describes the LLMs and other tools that the general public calls “AI.”

It also says that data they transmit is encrypted, and given that clients are probably not turning off spellcheck or other “Editor” features, any “exposure” of their content will have started with them.

Steps for Windows users

In Word, look in File > Options > Trust Center > Trust Center Settings > Privacy Options > Privacy Settings.

Though it says “turn ON optional connected experiences” it is an opt-out feature that will have been turned on by default. Click to remove the checkmark.

Steps for Mac users

In Word’s preferences, click Privacy then deselect the checkbox near the bottom. Though it says “turn ON optional connected experiences,” it is an opt-out feature that will have been turned on by default.

Steps for Word on the web users

Look for the “Trust Centre” settings. Though it says “turn ON optional connected experiences” it is an opt-out feature that will have been turned on by default.

The use of AI in the Office suite outside of Word is far more extensive.

Troubleshooting

Bad news, PerfectIt users on Mac: This scraping feature has to be ON to use PerfectIt Cloud. Not that PI scrapes anything, just Word. I don’t know if there’s a solution. I will post one if I find it!

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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

What Is a Word

Dictionaries are full of texts strings identified as words, but what a piece of software considers to be a word might surprise you. Some systems conjoin words separated by a slash or dash. Some don’t count words with numbers in them. Footnotes, running heads and footers, captions, and text in comments (or tracked changes) may or may not get counted.

Text segmentation rules for word boundaries (such as a space) and dividers are used by software define “a word.” but rules differ enough to find great discrepancies.

Punctuation Can Create Single Words

Some factors determining whether a string is counted as one or more words include:

• a slash separating/joining words
• a non-breaking space—e.g., 25°C
• a hyphen creating a compound word

Punctuation Can Cause Multiple Words

• hyphenated compounds and number ranges (hyphen or en-dash)
• thousands and thousandths separators
• units of measurement
• segmentation of URLs

Not a Word

• symbols such as math operators, ordinals, em-dashes, or ©
• headers and footers
• captions in fields
• comments in edits (tracked changes or suggestions features)
• equations in MathType or equivalent field

The Counts

I ran a very short test document through a word count in the most popular word processing programs. Here is the results summary; there is a longer comparison table at the end:

• Word: 50
• Google Doc: 54
• Txt: 56
• Pages: 54
• LaTeX: 64 (via export)
• PDF: 57 (via export)

Alternatives to Counting Words

For works full of really long words, character counts can give more accurate estimates of manuscript length and how long editing will take. Like word counts, character counts are better than page counts which vary too much to be practical because of the affect of letter and margin sizes (for starters).

Back when counting by hand was the only option, prepositions and conjunctions were routinely skipped. You’d count the words on a few typical lines, then multiply by the number of lines. For columnar layouts, that often meant getting an average per inch of column and multiplying by total column inches.

Consistency is what really matters rather than “correctness”—so pick one way to count and stick to it.

Element	Counted as
	Word	Google Doc	Txt	Pages	LaTeX*	PDF*	AnyCount
COUNT	50	54	56	54	64	57
header	0	0		0			–
footer	0	0		0			–
comments	0	0		0			–
—	1	2		1			1
time-stamp	1	1		2			1
cat&dog	1	2		2			1
she’d	1	1		1			1
3[nonbreaking]F	2	1		2			2
8–9	2	1		2			1
8-9	1	1		2			1
3.14		2		1			1
teacher–author	2	1		2			1
dash — spaced	2	3		2			3
or—not	2	1		2			1
slash/unspaced	1	2		2
slash / spaced	2	2		2
http://www.url.ca	1	4		4
—30—	1	1		1
–#–	2	2		0
picture	0	n/a		n/a
caption	full, including “figure #” tag
symbols ©	1@	1@		0
math + 10 ÷ 8 ½	6	6		4
text box	0	0		yes

*Content was exported from the PDF and LaTeX documents because those systems don’t have built-in word counters. Since this is something you might have to do, it  was worth testing it anyway.

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Search field update!

The Search field at the top right edge of the Word window border still searches within the document by default, but now includes a bunch of “suggested actions” that no one has ever wanted when opening the Find function. Though it does give access to the Search “sidebar” pane by clicking on “Find and replace.”

The Search Pane this new menu promises is a new web search “powered by Bing”—not the Word Search sidebar/pane at all. The Search in Pictures option is also a web search using Bing, not a search of your own computer or MS Word media.

How to access Word’s new Search window on a Mac

Launch this new Search tool by clicking on it, or do the new finger-yoga keyboard shortcut:

cmd + ctrl + U

AYes! It involves the multilevel list button on the Home ribbon and (at best) Styles for each level in the list.

I had to figure this out myself, last year. And let me tell you: it may not be perfect, but it cuts an 11-hour job down to 1 hour!

What is wanted is to turn lists like Fig. 1 into lists like Fig. 2. The next section describes the most functional fix, though you could skip assigning Styles, I guess, and just use the troubleshooting method at the end.

Steps to Change Multilevel List Formatting in Word

1. Create a new (correct) Style for each level in the bulleted list.
2. Apply the new Styles to one correct list.
3. Select the whole list, and click the Multilevel list icon on the Home ribbon (see top of Fig. 3, below).
4. Then click Define New Multilevel List…

Troubleshooting

This system is rarely perfect, so skim between the original and revised files side-by-side on your large screen to check for lists that need further tweaking.

For the lists/lines that are still not styled right, follow this shortcut:

• Click on a line that is at the top level in another list within the document, then click Select All in the Styles pane (Fig. 4, below).

• Click the “Bullet Level 1” Style you created, to apply that style to all the currently selected content.
• Repeat for the remaining levels of content in the lists: select a line styled as the second level, select all in that style, and apply “Bullet Level 2” style, and so forth.

Image of nesting dolls by allysonmiller1969 from Pixabay

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The Tables group (item?) on the Insert ribbon is where to both insert a table and where to turn tabbed content into a table without the need to retype or drag and drop.

Below you’ll find a roundup of posts explaining the best practices for working with tables, specifically in an editorial production workflow. These posts build on top of the explanations and guides found in the multimedia guide to Editing In Word 365.

The Table Design and Layout ribbons contain a lot more related functions. Watch for that roundup, to come. Or use the search bar below to find what you need.

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“OK,” I thought, “there’s always a few lingering typos, and looking at it in a new way (as happens when uploading) can reveal them.”

But as I was trying to compare the manuscript to the ebook to ensure all of it was there, I noticed that nearly every transition on the first few pages had changed, several punctuation marks in the ebook shouldn’t have been there, hyphens appeared where em dashes should be, and some whole paragraphs were missing. This made checking for content gaps impossible, and it made me wonder how much was actually changed after the copyedit. Here’s how I figured it out.

Exporting the ebook to MS Word let me run some checks, but I had to dig further to get a meaningful layer of detail I could use to revise my work estimate and explain to the client why this “proofread” would cost significantly more than anticipated.

The Steps

Here’s the process and result, along with 3 extremely helpful macros:

1. Export ebook to an epub file (or any format that you can convert to MS Word).
2. Convert file to MS Word docx file.
3. Compare docs (using Word’s Compare button on the Review ribbon) to track the changes between the “live” published book and the “dead” manuscript that was copyedited.
4. Use a macro to count how many words those changes included:
   • TrackChanges_WordCount
   • Optional: Record the number of tracked additions and deletions from MS Word’s “Revision Summary” on the Revisions pane.
5. Use a different macro to highlight all sentences containing tracked changes.
   • HighlightCountRevisedSentences (see end of post)
6. Then use Advanced Find > Format > Highlight > “Highlight all items found in:” to select, then copy those highlighted sentences.
7. Paste into a new document to get a word count, since all of those words need to be checked, not just the changed words.
8. Use yet another macro to count the total number of sentences in the manuscript and divide this by #7. (Because Words “document stats” report was saying the 137 page document had 113 sentences, which was clearly wrong).
   • CountSentences

The Results

In my document, this process found:

• 814 Additions (4280 words)
• 670 Deletions (3163 words)
• 2224 Sentences total (48,714 words)
• 690 Sentences changed (containing 11,190 words) — or about 1/4 of the total

And that doesn’t even take into account how these changes affect content elsewhere!

HighlightCountRevisedSentences Macro

This macro highlights sentences that contain tracked changes if you want it to. Otherwise it just counts them. Kevin of Kevin Walker Editing and Design answered my cry for help with this macro he had asked Bing AI to write for him not much earlier. It worked for me right away.

Note that I added a line listing codes for all of the various colours of highlighting available, and that Kevin has a note in there saying to “note out” (put a single quote mark at the start of the line) the highlight line if you don’t want material highlighted, only counted. To make your macro, paste the code below in Word’s VBA. Part IV of the book explains how.

Sub HighlightCountRevisedSentences()

Dim snt As Range
Dim i As Integer

i = 0
For Each snt In ActiveDocument.Sentences
        If snt.Revisions.Count > 0 Then
            i = i + 1

' shading codes: wdBlue   wdBrightGreen  wdTeal
wdDarkBlue     wdDarkRed  wdDarkYellow   wdGray25    wdGray50       wdGreen    wdPink         wdRed    wdTurquoise    wdViolet   wdWhite        wdYellow
' Delete/comment out the next line if you don't want shading
            snt.HighlightColorIndex = wdGray25
        End If
    Next snt
    MsgBox i & " sentences containing revisions"
End Sub

The © polo bear [sic] eating the right angel was drawn by the author. The “find the differences” images of sushi comes via Pixabay.

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1 Maggying the file is always helpful. It’s very easy, but very, very specific:

1. Turn off Track Changes.
2. Copy everything but the final ¶ mark.
3. In a new document also with Track Changes off, paste the contents.

2 Reduce the size of images in all of these ways, if they’re not the version that will be used for printing:

1. Drag the image edge to resize it as a thumbnail (or just “smaller”).
2. Delete the cropped bits that Word was saving in case you changed your mind.
3. Reduce the resolution to only what the file needs.

4 Built right into Word is a “Reduce file size” from the File menu.

In there you’ll find a way to drop the cropped parts of pictures AND reduce their resolution.

Here is the effect of using this function on a 2000 word file containing 20 images of 1/8 page size each.

5 Combine these methods for drastic savings!

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For the format painter, moved your shift finger over to the opt/alt button: Shift + Opt + C (or V) is now Cmd + Opt + C (or V). This change makes it a one-handed move!

If you don’t have this change yet, you’re now forewarned. If you don’t like the change, the announcement from MS has instructions on how to revert to the previous shortcut settings you know so well.

Got a gnarly Word problem? Submit your problem and we’ll try to answer it in the Q&A thread.

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© This blog and all materials in it are copyright Adrienne Montgomerie on the date of publication. All rights reserved. No portion may be stored or distributed without express written permission. Asking is easy!