A useful hack in MS Word

[hrj]

So the "problem" I wanted to find a solution for is that the first market I'm shipping Daughter of Mystery off to has a few less-common formatting requirements in their style sheet that will require a bit of hand-tweaking. The most significant part of these requirements is that their house style doesn't use the serial comma. There are a couple other similar items where they require one of two options that is different from my own default settings. A more minor issue are things like chapter formatting and whatnot.

When you combine this with the sure and certain knowledge that, at some point in my final just-about-out-the-door review, I will undoubtedly find more minor corrections and tweaks, and the realistic understanding that I may have to send it out to more than one publisher before it finds a home ... well, there's a potential for annoying amounts of re-work.

So it seemed to me that there should be a way to use the Track Changes function in Word to keep different classes of edits separate: one group that was just the style issues, one for the formatting specifics, one for substantial edits. So here's how it works:

1) Tracked changes are "tagged" with the reviewer's identity. This tag shows up when you view the document with one of the "show markup" options, and you can view only one reviewer's changes at a time using the "Show Reviewers" menu in the Reviewing toolbar.

2) The reviewer's identity is taken from the "user information" panel in the Preferences menu. Change the user name in that panel and new edits will be tracked under that identity with previous edits tracked under the previous identity. Change the identity back to some previously used name, and new changes under that name will be tracked in the same group as the previous changes under that name.

3) Tracked changes can be accepted (incorporated into the document with no history-trace) or rejected (removed from the document entirely) wholesale as well as one as a time. But there's also an option for "accept/reject all changes shown".

4) So if I want to accept only "substantial edits", I select to view only the edits by the identity I used to make them and then "accept all changes shown". Conversely, if I want to revert only one specific set of formatting options, I select to view only the reviewer associated with that set of changes and "reject all changes shown".

It takes a bit of paying attention when making changes under the specialized identities so that I don't reflexively fix other things while using that identity. And the version that I'll be sending off for consideration will be an "accept all changes" version of final edit, to avoid confusing and subsequent editors of that file. And, of course, magical thinking means that, having gone through all this trouble to make life easier for subsequent submissions with other requirements, all the work will be for nothing because my first market will snap it up. Right?

Comments

[hrj.livejournal.com]

*shrug* In principle, I agree with you. But this is most assuredly a professional (small) press and is a major player in the lesbian fiction market. I rather suspect this is a combination of filtering out amateurs who can't follow directions and a matter of not having an enormous post-acceptance editorial budget. Probably a bit more of the former than the latter.