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Stephen Cashmore – How to Use Macros – 23 October 2024.

Ah yes, macros.

No, not the Cash-and-Carry store keeping Food Professionals well-stocked, although this was mentioned to me during tea-break.

I’m talking about the clever little shortcuts in Microsoft Word that are beloved by editors and copywriters alike.

Wait!

Can I ask you to pause your collective groaning for a quick straw poll? Hands up if you enjoy creative writing? (This should be a given – we are a writers’ club, after all!). What about the proof-reading and editing that follows? Thought so, just the few hands still up….

Well, as AWC member Stephen Cashmore convinced us this Wednesday past, proof-reading becomes much easier in Word if you make friends with macros. These are short pieces of code which automate editing tasks at the click of a button. Stephen, an experienced editor and recently published novelist, was quick to reassure us that no coding or computer programming was required; we just needed to know what we wanted to edit and where to find the Macro commands in the software.

Stephen then demonstrated some neat little tricks, including swapping words that were in the wrong order, replacing commas and full stops, and amending the uppercase status Word helpfully sets whenever there’s a full stop preceding a letter. The latter can often result in pesky typos when you include dialogue in your writing, as the quotation marks get disregarded. In each case, the task was captured as a macro, ready for use again whenever required. It was obvious from the numerous buttons along the top of Stephen’s Word document that he uses macros wherever possible to make life easier for himself!

(Have I caught your attention yet? OK, then, it’s the Developer tab you need for macros, normally found top right of the screen in your Word document.)

Anyway, back to editing. Apparently, these tasks were only the beginning, the “Little Ones”, as Stephen referred to them. Simple actions converted into macros using the Record Macro function in Word. Now we moved onto the “Big Ones” – complicated tasks that the Record Macro function would respond to with sarcastic laughter and a pointed “No”. Again, Stephen was quick with his reassurance.

Most professionals in the editing world have “Clean Up” macros, long coded scripts that complete multiple editing events in a couple of seconds. Fortunately for us, these scripts are available on the internet and are easily added to our own versions of Word. In fact, the straightforward download and implementation process was demonstrated by Stephen in the second half of his presentation. We were advised to check out the FREDIT macro (‘Find, Replace, Edit’, FYI, although I couldn’t help thinking of frogs every time it was mentioned), and also the macro scripts written and compiled by Paul Beverley ( https://www.archivepub.co.uk/book.html ).

We finished the evening with the results from our club Flash Fiction competition. Next up it’s the General Short Story competition, and AWC has a week off next Wednesday due to the Club Committee meeting. Plenty of time for you to craft that competition tale AND play around with some editing macros. Just don’t forget to visit your preferred food warehouse for some snacks first.

Maggie Morton

 

 

 

 

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