To Find and Compare Tips for Using MS Word

To Find and Compare

April 25, 2014

Recently, I've been formatting my fiction manuscript in MS Word 2007 for various distribution channels and have done a lot of copying and pasting, which can create errors. After all of this copying and pasting, I figured I needed to read through my text again to make sure I hadn't forgotten to paste anything, or hadn't accidentally duplicated something. But I wasn’t looking forward to re-reading my manuscript for about the thirtieth time. And in all honesty, it’s probably more than thirty times. There were two tools in MS Word that helped cut my proofreading time down considerably.

The Find Feature

Okay, so I've known about this for a while, but only recently come to appreciate its usefulness. Let’s say you decide to change the way you spell a character’s name. I’ll take my character in book two, Rees, as an example. (I actually had to do this.)

I changed my mind and don’t want to spell it R-H-Y-S anymore, but R-E-E-S. The thought of reading through the document to find all cases of his name makes me shudder. So, instead, I’ll use the ‘find’ feature.

1. Click on Find.

2. Choose Find in the drop down menu and then choose the Replace tab.

3. And type in the word you need to change in the box. In my case, it’s Rhys.

4. If you want to go incident-by-incident, just click ‘find next’ and then hit ‘replace’. But to make it faster, click ‘replace all’. A bit of warning—hitting ‘replace all’ will replace any example where the letters are consecutive in the same word. For instance, if you also had the word ‘TREES’, somewhere in your writing, this feature would also highlight and change ‘trees’ to ‘Rhys’.

Compare

When I needed to arrange my manuscript into a 6x9 Word Template, I did a lot more copying and pasting. In a template, it usually has filler words to show you where the text goes. If you don’t delete or paste over all of these words, you end up with nonsensical text woven into your story. Not fun!

The neat thing about ‘compare document’ is you can find large chunks of text that don’t belong in your writing.

To do this, you’ll need to go to the ‘Review’ screen in Word.

1. In the top bar, third from the right side, is the ‘Compare’ button. Click it and choose compare.

2. It will ask you which documents you want to open. You’ll need to open an earlier version that you know is clean, and then open the piece you’re working on.

3. Four screens come up in MS Word Compare: the original document, the new document, track changes, and the new document in center screen.

4. Scroll through the center screen, and notice Word highlighted, in red, anything different from your original. When it compared my manuscripts, it highlighted all the filler text, and I was able to delete each instance. You can also use the track changes screen on the far left and then click on the ‘Next’ or ‘Previous’ buttons to the left of the ‘Compare’ button on the main bar to move through each change. If you want to accept the change, click ‘Accept’ or if not, ‘Reject’.

Hopefully, this might make someone’s editing less tedious. If this helped you, let me know, or if you have your own tips, share them in the comments below.

Happy writing!

Dee

Image courtesy of Stuart Miles at www.freedigitalphotos.net