Cleaning up Word documents

This practical session will look at the sorts of issues that can be lurking in a Word document which can cause problems during editing and later stages of publication, including manual formatting, bad or non-existent use of styles, incorrect characters, unwanted spaces, colours, patterns and shading, and material in fields, text boxes and content controls. You’ll start to build a clean-up toolkit and understand why clean-up should be part of a copyeditor’s routine. We’ll do a short exercise as an example of how to do clean-up.

The session is based on my experience of doing this clean-up for over 20 years. As well as copyediting, I offer design and layout and therefore know what issues editors can resolve to make that production stage easier.

I will give NEaT members a code to get a discount on my clean-up book if you wish to buy that for more information.

Bio:

Margaret works with organisations, businesses and independent authors to get their books, documents and online content published. As well as editing the words, she designs and prepares page layouts for print and digital and creates templates, ebooks and accessible PDFs. Before setting up Daisy Editorial in 2003 she spent over 14 years working in information and publications in an international legal firm, a local authority and several NGOs.

Margaret is an Advanced Professional Member of the CIEP. She was a Council director of the SfEP and then the CIEP from 2015 to 2021. She’ll be joining you from Fife in Scotland.