The Open Desk

Margie Beilharz

Freelance editor and writer in science, environment, education, health

Tag: writing

  • PerfectIt teams with CMOS

    Many editors swear by PerfectIt as a must-have tool to help produce consistent and style-adhering texts. A new style sheet has just been released. Developed in conjunction with The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), it takes PerfectIt to a new level 一 great news for those who use CMOS and possibly also for others. If you already use PerfectIt and subscribe to CMOS…

  • Create a table of contents using Word Styles

    Create a table of contents using Word Styles

    Creating a table of contents (TOC) is super easy if you have applied styles to your headings. If you are new to styles, start at my introductory post What are Word Styles and how do you use them?

  • Use Word Styles for navigating around and restructuring your document

    Use Word Styles for navigating around and restructuring your document

    Word Styles offer more than simply and consistently formatting text; they give you lots of power in organising your whole document. For those new to using Styles, you might want to check out the introduction in my previous post:  What are Word Styles and how do you use them? In the next few posts I’ll…

  • What are Word Styles and how do you use them?

    What are Word Styles and how do you use them?

    You can easily format text in Microsoft Word with the options you can see in your Home ribbon. You can choose your font, font size, colour, bold and italics (character options) and also paragraph options like bullet points, alignment, indenting, spacing between lines and paragraphs, and lots more.

  • What Word style is your text is formatted in?

    Here are six ways to check what Word style your text is in (the last two are my favourites):

  • Microsoft Word skills for editors: basic to advanced

    Microsoft Word skills for editors: basic to advanced

    Many editors prefer the features and power of Microsoft Word – especially when copyediting – over Google Docs and other online and collaborative programs. So, even though the latter are increasingly being used for writing and producing documents, Word remains the standard program for editing documents. Nowadays it’s pretty much assumed that writers and editors have…

  • Summarising tracked changes in Word

    Summarising tracked changes in Word

    A few months ago, I wrote about having trouble getting an author to see my tracked changes in Word (and showed a solution for that problem in PDFs). Since then, I’ve come across some solutions in Word too. I wanted my client to see my tracked edits, but they seemed to not see the edits…

  • Book review: Make grammar great again

    What do you do when Donald Trump becomes president of the United States? Stop watching the news? Book a flight into space? Hope the next four years will pass really quickly? Melbourne copyeditor Meredith Forrester took a more proactive approach. Irritated by the President’s language-mangling tweets, she took it upon herself to respond with corrections.

  • Reflections not resolutions

    Happy New Year and all the best for a great 2018. Rather than coming up with New Year’s resolutions – which we all know are very hard to keep – I’m taking the opportunity of the holiday break to reflect on what I can do to achieve my professional goals in 2018. In short, I…

  • My Freelance Register posting is up

    Update 2018: We now have a national directory for Australian freelance editors, which you can find at http://iped-editors.org/Find_an_editor. Yay, my posting on the Editors Victoria Freelance Register is up. Here I am.