Working in a marketing office and having a reputation as a "writer", it falls to me to proof a lot of the text before we turn it over to the designers. Problem: I have only limited amounts of time (and patience) to make some of these "easy peasy" changes people should be doing already.
So, when I was faced with an 80-page handbook yesterday, I decided that now was the time to fully engage the "find and replace" function in Word.
"Find and replace" is pretty cool, if you haven't used it. You can usually bring it up by holding down the command or open apple key at the same time as the "F" key. I'll leave it to you and Word Help to figure out the mechanics of using it.
I did want to share some of the ways I used it to save time and give you some ideas:
- Building names: People just do not like writing out building names in documents. That's a problem, because not everyone understands the two-letter abbreviations used. So, I did a find and replace to make every "SU" into "Student Union." Time saved: 5 minutes
- Two spaces after a period: Yeah, this sounds real nit-picky, but it's harder for the designers to work with text with sorts of spaces between sentences. So I typed ".(space) (space)" into the find box and had it replace it with ".(space) Time saved: 10 minutes
- Capping our name incorrectly: We're kinda self-important -- like The Ohio State University, we are always "The University of Toledo." Accept no lower-case "the's"! I did a case-sensitive "find and replace" to eradicate all of the "the University of Toledo's" and make them "The University of Toledo." Time saved: 5 minutes
- Phone numbers: We usually ask people to write them like "123-456-7890." However, I usually see "(123)456-7890." So I did a find for "(123)" and replaced it with "123-" Time saved: 10 minutes
It might take you a little bit of time to master the "find and replace" function, but believe me, you'll be ahead in the end!
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3 comments:
DW--Forgive me, but I must correct you. "Find and replace" isn't my best friend, my husband is. It's my second-best friend!
But please, don't get me started on the capitalized "the." Which leads me to another great purpose for using find and replace: fixing punctuation that should be enclosed in parentheses or quotation marks!
I've been using this function for more than a decade, and it's incredibly helpful. I liked it better when the keystrokes shortcuts were shorter, though.
Grad school marketer -- I know, indulge a figure of speech. If you're married, though, your hubby shouldn't just be your best friend -- he should be your best everything! I know mine is.
Anonymous: yes, I agree on the keystrokes point.
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