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Macros – Barriers and solutions

More and more editors and proofreaders are realising the huge potential of macros tools – and the macros are free! However, not everyone seems able to benefit from them, so what are the barriers, and are there any solutions?

Confidence barriers

‘It’s too complicated’, ‘I’m not technically minded’, ‘I tried before and simply couldn’t make sense of it.’

Technical barriers

There are computer technicalities to work through, and many people do find that they need support to get things going in the first place.

Conceptual barriers

Unfortunately, to gain the greatest benefit from these tools you will need to learn (some) new ways of working, but that’s true of most new-fangled techno-tools.

Solutions – professional

Ideally, our professional bodies would set up training courses,1 but sadly, while the macros are free, courses aren’t: it takes time and money to develop and set up the courses, and then you have to shell out money to then take the course(s).

Solutions – self-help – and free!

The two most important barriers to overcome are (a) getting started with macros in the first place and then, once you’re up and running, (b) getting started with FRedit – ‘Find and Replace edit’ – the single most powerful macro, and this does involve grasping some new concepts.

In theory both can be achieved by: ‘Just download these free instructions and follow them:’

(a) Getting started with macros – Macros from Square One

(b) Getting started with FRedit – FRedit from Square One

Links to both are here.

But, being realistic, most people could really do with some help. Our view, however, is that your  own colleagues could help you get through to the next stage – even if they themselves have only recently broken through.

Jennifer and I feel strongly about the huge potential, so please consider working alongside colleagues to help them move forward into this new area.

Practical suggestion

For either of the ‘Square One’ documents, please feel free to contact Paul and arrange a ‘safety net’ Zoom session. The idea is that you sit down and have a go at the relevant Square One, knowing that when (if) you come unstuck you only have to wait until the Zoom session, and Paul will help you through. (Having arranged a date/time with one person, Paul would then advertise it so that others could join in on the day.)

Better still, arrange a time with a colleague to work through the Square One, again perhaps with Paul’s  Zoom as a longstop.

Together we can do this!

Paul Beverley, paul@archivepub.co.uk

Jennifer Yankopolus

30 October 2024

[1] EFA in the States offers Macros from A to Z: six weekly sessions run by the top world macro-trainer, Jennifer Yankopolus. For news of the next course, see Jennifer’s training page: https://macroofthemonth.substack.com/p/training

 

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‘The Best Macro Ever?’

by Paul Beverley

Our recent macro survey shows how much editors value the speed and accuracy gains available, but here I want to concentrate on one of your favourites, FRedit, which for me is the best macro ever.

  • Good news: FRedit is potentially the best macro ever
  • Bad news: It’s quite a challenge to get started

But our experience as macro trainers is that many editors once felt exactly the same about macros:

  • Good news: Macros can potentially save you lots of time
  • Bad news: It’s quite a challenge to get started

So what are your ‘best macros’ according to our Editors Macro Survey (spring 2024)?

  • 1          CaseThisWord
  • 2          DocAlyse
  • 3=       GoogleFetch
  • 3=       [Dictionary]Fetch
  • 5          ProperNounAlyse
  • 6          FRedit
  • 7          HyphenAlyse
  • 8          CitationAlyse
  • 9=       NumberToTextUK / US
  • 9=       HighlightPlus

As you can see, FRedit is only number six – I wonder why?

Well, if you look at the other nine macros, I’d say that, conceptually, each is moderately straightforward, and it would be easy for you to explain its function to a macro-newbie. Not so with FRedit.

So is it worth the effort of learning? Well, you could ask a colleague who uses it, but you could just trust my experience, especially when you know that I started using a FRedit-like tool in an Apple-related application 37 years ago!

This technique really does work, and it’s powerful even if you only use it at a relatively simple level.

So what happened 37 years ago that generated this tool? I was using two computers, an Apple Mac Plus and an Archimedes computer from Acorn Computers in Cambridge, UK, to create an Acorn-based magazine.

Each month, I needed to transfer the Apple text across to the Acorn, but the Apple used dashes, ligatures (fi, fl), curly quotes and bullets (•), which I had to convert back to hyphens, ‘proper’ letter pairs, straight quotes and asterisks. (Yes, I know, but this was 37 years ago!)

So I did it by using a series of global F&Rs and, in case I forgot any, I kept a list of them all on one piece of paper. Then one day I thought: ‘Hang on! Couldn’t a computer program do this for me?!’ So someone in the Acorn community wrote one, and all I then had to do was to open a file containing a list of all the changes:

fi|fi

fl|fl

‘|’

’|’

etc

And that’s it! You now understand the principle of FRedit, so download a copy of the learning material FRedit from Square One and get started. (FSO was written by ace trainer Jennifer Yankopolus.)

We need training

But to be fair, it isn’t that easy a concept to get your head around, so we do need training. So why not get onto the training group in your professional body and encourage them to create a short course to teach how to use this powerful tool.

But the good news is that EFA already have such a course: Macros from A to Z: six weekly sessions, with one week devoted solely to FRedit, and it’s run by the top world macro-trainer, Jennifer Yankopolus. For news of the next running of the course, see Jennifer’s training page:

Taking it further

While FRedit can save you time even if you only use it in fairly simple ways, it is potentially an extremely powerful system with a wealth of facilities that you could gradually learn to use. As the years go by, you could get FRedit to do more and more of the mundane aspects of your work.

Today, FRedit has

  • 17-page user manual
  • 22 videos on YouTube (from beginners to advanced)
  • 107-page FRedit library of applications
  • 22 other FRedit-related macros, e.g. HyphenationToFRedit or ProperNounToFRedit

‘Invest time to save time’ – it’s definitely worthwhile in the long run.

Paul Beverley, paul@archivepub.co.uk

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‘A Tale of Many Favorites’ Or ‘Confessions of a Formerly Hesitant Macro User’

By Jennifer Yankopolus

Initially, my favorite macros were the analysis ones: ProperNounAlyse, HyphenAlyse, and WordPairAlyse. As a new macro user, they were the easiest for me to understand and seemed to offer the biggest discernible benefits, helping me to identify inconsistencies.

After a few months of using analysis macros, I was hungry for more, grateful that they were making me more confident in my work. Where else could they enhance my editing? I tried out different types, but it wasn’t until I discovered GoogleFetch that I began to truly understand what was possible. That one macro, along with MerriamFetch, convinced me that it was worth learning how to assign—and remember—keyboard shortcuts and take the necessary time to adapt my way of doing things. (For country-specific Google and dictionary macros, consult the Macro Menu.)

While the analysis macros were easy to adopt, I confess that I had been hesitant about using macros while I was actively editing. It seemed like it would be disruptive, and I wasn’t particularly keen on having to adjust my editing routine. Since you run analysis macros only once on a document as a pre-check before you start editing, I didn’t have to use a keyboard shortcut to run them, and I didn’t have to remember to deploy them while I was in the flow of editing.

But then as I was editing, I began to notice all the small, repetitive text and punctuation edits I was making that could be carried out by macros. The inefficiency of making these edits manually suddenly became clear, and the number of macros I installed expanded as quickly as I could memorize them and their shortcuts. Gone was my reluctance to rework my process.

My current favorites take care of everyday punctuation and capitalization edits and even deleting text—small edits that my fingers are happy to transfer to the macros:

Comma: changes the punctuation mark after the current word to a comma or adds one
FullPoint: changes the punctuation mark after the current word to a full stop/period and capitalizes the next word. (Bonus feature: If there is an “and”, select it and the macro will delete that too.)
PunctuationToHyphen: changes a dash or space to a closed-up hyphen
PunctuationOff: deletes the next upcoming punctuation mark
DeleteOneWord: deletes the current word
DeleteRestOfSentence: deletes text from the cursor to the end of the sentence
CaseThisWord: changes the capitalization of the current word

I am especially aware of how much these macros, and others, have reduced the strain on my hands and wrists from gripping the mouse to select the text and precisely place the cursor. I only wish I could use them when writing emails and in Slack and other messaging apps.

Next on the horizon? To learn how to move the cursor using shortcuts. While this doesn’t involve macros (Word has preset shortcuts that will do this), it will make using these speed-editing macros more efficient and lessen the strain even more.

Jennifer Yankopolus is an editor and macro trainer in the US, and author of the Macro of the Month newsletter.

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Best timesaver?

My friend Jack is a relative newcomer to macros, but when he lost all his macros in the middle of an urgent job, he realised how much time they had saved him. (“You don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone!”)

After I’d helped him to get them back, he told me that the macros he had missed most were InstantFindUp, InstantFindDown and FindFwd, FindBack.

The book had a lot of technical words which the author had sometimes used with an article and sometimes without. As he read through the text, he had to keep checking for consistency, so he clicked in the word (or selected a phrase) and used InstantFindDown to jump straight to the next occurrence and then FindFwd/Back to jump back and forth between them.

It’s only a small time saving compared with using Word’s own Find facilities, but these small savings, when multiplied, do add up – if you see what I mean!

Watch them in action (and other search macros) in a 12-min video: Macro Masterclass 2. They appear in the first 2/3 minutes of the video, but then there are other fun macros you might like.

Which macro(s) could YOU not do without? Please let us know.

For me, it has to be FRedit; if that were lost and I had to do all my global find and replaces manually I’d give up doing any editing! (Watch out for the forthcoming training materials to get you started with FRedit.)

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Macro security

I’ve been getting a few enquiries recently from people saying that, after Word had been updated, their macros had disappeared and/or the keystrokes assigned to them.

So back them up!

(As I wrote that, I backed up my macros and keystrokes – it took me all of 7 seconds!)

Then if something goes wrong, you can restore them from your most recent backup – that would take me all of 20 seconds.

Invest time now to save time later: set up this high-speed backup, as per the instructions in this pdf. (Separate instructions for Mac and PC provided, thanks to Jennifer Yankopolus.)

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Banish RSI

Do you suffer from RSI (repetitive strain injury) from doing too much mousework? I hope not!

Jennifer Yankopolus, in her macros training course is very strong on the idea that macros can help to avoid RSI. Thankfully, it’s not something I had suffered from – but note the tense there!

Three months ago, Sue and I were on one of our many trips down to central London from Norwich, two hours each way on the train. To help pass the time, we had the idea of playing Scrabble on my laptop. At home, we often play together, against the computer which is great fun – and it’s good for marital harmony!

We only did so on one journey, but I have had RSI pain in my elbow ever since – over two months now. Why?

To play Scrabble, you have to use the mouse to shuffle the tiles around and then drag them onto the board. However, on the board, if you don’t place them accurately, they jump back to the letter rack and you have to try again. As the train does bounce around a fair bit, I was constantly gripping the mouse hard and, as I say, I’ve had RSI pain ever since, though thankfully it’s abating slowly.

Jennifer is right that macros can help you avoid RSI, and so in this video, I’ve explained how and why you can reduce the problem.