If I had to describe myself, it would be in a word that has many meanings with a complexity which falls off the tongue.
A word made up of many elements, is deceptive in appearance, and creates an illusion from the imagination.
My word would be Phantasmagoric. ~Summer Ross

Thursday, June 20, 2013

Word Macros For Editing

After an hour yesterday of manually deleting tab indents and replacing them with paragraph indents for formatting, I was seriously cheesed. 

 How obnoxious! It's cruel and unusual punishment.

And man did it make my tendonitis flair up in my hands. I could barely move my fingers properly.
So, I ran away from the computer- right into the arms of my writers group and I told them my dilemma.

Guess what one member told me "There's a macro for that!"

Well at least you can make one for it. ~Grins~

And because it's so important to me, I spent the better part of three hours trying to figure out how to make a macro that deletes tab arrow and then replaces with paragraph indents. And I did it. I'm so excited!

A Macro is a set of instructions that can be triggered by a keyboard shortcut or toolbar button.

Do you use macros for writing or editing? If so what are they for?

Do you want me to do a tutorial on this tab/indent macro I made for MS office?

11 comments:

Hilary Melton-Butcher said...

Hi Summer - sounds a very useful thing to know about .. so yes please.

I can hear your frustration in your post - but am so glad the writers' group came to your rescue ..

Look forward to seeing your post ..good luck with the rest of the editing .. cheers Hilary

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

I don't use macros, but you should do the tutorial, as I bet you'll save someone hours of frustration.

Old Kitty said...

Yay for macros!! And yes please to the tutorial! Thank you! Take care
x

Bob/Sally said...

I have a few custom macro's I use to deal with formatting issues resulting from different systems or word processors - hyphens, apostrophes, quotation marks, etc.

shelly said...

Yes. Please do a tutorial. That would be great.

Hugs and chocolate,
Shelly

Cherie Reich said...

I haven't tried doing macros before, although I've heard they are very useful. I just use the old "Find" and "Replace" to get rid of Tabs. Then I select all text and add in the indent. Of course, then you have to change the indent for chapters and the like, but it's pretty quick (at least with MS Word).

VikLit said...

I have just spent ages doing that too. I had no idea a macro could have done this! I say yes please do a tutorial!

Christine Rains said...

Oh yes, I use a macro for that. I'm lucky my husband is a programmer. So any time I need a macro, I just call him in to my office!

M Pax said...

I've heard of macros, but now indent my work instead of tabbing. There's lots of stuff MSWord can do that none of us have a clue about. Tutorial away if you wish. I'm sure at some point most of us will have a need for it.

Donna Smith said...

Don't you just love when you learn something new like that? Conquered! A tutorial would probably be very helpful to lots of people.

Sue Ann Bowling said...

You don't need a macro; a search and replace followed by formating for paragraph indent will do for that.

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