Welcome to MS Office tech tips: quotes and apostrophes edition!

As this blog has discussed before, different clients have different document formatting and commenting requirements. Most of us probably have some clients who require all “smart” punctuation and others who require all “straight” punctuation.

So, what do you do if you don’t want to turn Word’s auto-formatting on and off every time you switch projects?

Well, it can be tricky. But if you’re struggling, I hope you can use the solution I’ve found to make life easier.

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Many of us translators work with clients who have very specific privacy requirements. If we don’t start our projects exactly right for those requirements, it can be quite time-consuming to fix everything individually later. But I’m happy to report that I’ve found a great solution for changing commenter names, so I’d like to share it for anyone who may have encountered the same thing.

I have one client who requires translators to leave comments in various situations, but the comments in Microsoft Word must be labeled “Author” (instead of my name) with initial “A” (instead of my initial). This is no problem if Word is set up that way before I start, but what if forget to check that, I do the whole assignment in memoQ or another TEnT, and then discover only when I export the document that it has my name in all the comments instead of the anonymous “Author”?

I could delete all personal data from the document, which would make all the comments labeled “Author,” but this would also delete document properties saved by the original author whose work I’m translating. That shouldn’t be done without asking the client first. So, do I have to manually replace all of those comments?

Happily, no! Allen Wyatt has a macro which allows you to change just your name and initial in the comments. Here’s the link:

https://wordribbon.tips.net/T008614_Changing_the_User_Name_in_Existing_Comments.html

Happy comment editing!

If anyone out there is like me and just now switching (or just about to switch) from a previous version of Office to Office 2013, you may find yourself wanting to flip the table at a few of the seemingly random tweaks. Here are quick notes on two problems I’ve learned to make better so far:

1. The View shortcuts in the status bar (that’s the bit at the very bottom of the window) no longer include the button for the Draft View shortcut.

Yep, for no apparent reason, they now have a button here for every view but Draft. And you can’t add it. However, you can add a Draft View button to the Quick Access Toolbar (that’s the upper-left corner), which at least gives lets you switch with one click instead of going into the Ribbon every single time you want to use Draft. To get this shortcut:

• Go into the Views tab of the Ribbon.
• On the far left, you’ll see three big icons and two tiny icons for different views. The bottom tiny icon is Draft View.
• Right-click that icon and select “Add to Quick Access Toolbar.”

For screenshots of this process, see The first nine things I do to default settings in Word 2013. (If you want to get crazy and you know how macros work, there’s a thread here about setting up a macro to make Draft your default view.)

2. The Word 2013 cursor animation makes me crazier than any cursor animation has ever made me before, ever.

The motion of the cursor in Word 2013 made me seasick just watching it, and it seemed to slow the program down, too (or maybe it just felt that way because I was dying). Luckily, there is a very clear explanation of how to get rid of it right here: Office 2013: Disable transition and cursor animations. Update 3/3/2017: Need to know how to do this in Windows 10? Here you go!

I’m still in the process of settling in, so there are plenty of frustrations still to fix. These two have helped a lot, though–so if any of you have gone through the same trauma and would like to share your Office survival tips, you’ll find a willing ear here!