Microsoft Word and Excel for editors
Learning to harness the power of Word and Excel
Basics of Microsoft Word and Excel for copyeditors
Course details
Suggested timeline: 2–6 months into editing
Total time: Approx. 6 hours
Course description
This course provides a practical understanding of Microsoft Word and Excel.
The part on Microsoft Word will cover the following:
- Codes vs. Word styles
- Word template basics
- Creating a new template
- Creating shortcuts for styles
- Ordering styles in the Style Pane
- Applying styles (styling a document quickly)
- Metadata styles: use and importance
- Preparing a journal styling template
The part on Microsoft Excel will cover the following:
- Common and often-used features in Excel
- Basic requirements for a list in Excel (for performing various tasks)
- Filtration and sorting of items in various ways
- Custom sorting (a feature you may resort to quite often)
- Cell formatting; conditional formatting and its uses
- Use of a free Excel add-in to perform some useful tasks that add to the power of Excel
Understanding book design in terms of Microsoft Word styles and preparing a master template
Course details
Suggested timeline: 6–9 months into editing
Total time: Approx. 6 hours
Course description
The approach outlined in this course would be one of the best approaches to streamlining a book-editing project. Once you prepare a master template, your book editing projects would go so smoothly that you would forever enjoy this part of the book-editing process!
This course on understanding book design in terms of Word styles would cover the following:
- Understanding a design sample (analyses of various sample designs)
Identifying elements that need a style - Grouping the various elements of a book for convenience
- Understanding featured elements
- Named featured elements
- Standard elements as featured elements
- Sections as featured elements
- Case Studies as featured elements
- Generic featured elements
- Learning the nuances of preparing a book-styling template
- Understanding the use and importance of metadata styles
- Creating a Master template
- Preparing a project template from a Master template
Using Word macros for efficiency
Course details
Suggested timeline: 9–12 months into editing
Total time: Approx. 7 hours
Course description
The power of Microsoft Word lies in two things: (1) the visual formatting it can provide to documents (with a backend XML support) and (2) its potential for using macros to automate repetitive tasks. The earlier two courses covered the style and formatting aspects of Word, and the present course discusses the power of using macros in Word.
This course does not teach you how to write a Word macro. Rather, it provides you with all the basics to help you start using the hundreds of macros that are readily available on the Internet. That way you may be able to perform many repetitive tasks quickly, and the changes you make may also be consistent throughout the document. Overall, you may be handling Word quite efficiently and churning out work in quicker time!
This course on using Word macros will cover the following:
- Word documents vs. templates
- The Templates and Add-ins dialog box
- Word security settings to allow add-ins
- Steps to create a document template
- Locations for saving a template
- Visual Basic views and panes
- Basic components of VBA code
- Components of a macro
- Steps for using an available macro
- Naming of macros
- Testing your macros
- Troubleshooting macros that work in isolation but not otherwise
- Creating shortcuts for macros
- Adding a macro to the quick access toolbar
- Using some readily available macros: practical demonstration using all the above steps
- Tips for organizing your macros
- Multiple Find and Replace in Word using a readily available add-in
