Macros for editors? What? Why? How?

Listen in to any conversation between editors, and you’ll quite soon hear some reference to ‘macros’, but if you’re someone who hasn’t started using them yet, it can all sound rather arcane and daunting.

But if you’ve been told that you have to create your own macros (‘record’ them), please don’t panic; other people have created literally hundreds of macros for you – all totally free to use! Just pick them off the shelf for the way you want to work.

Questions you might reasonably ask include:

– How can I get started? Choose from a range of different approaches.
– How can I find the macros I want?  Download the Macro Menu pdf.
– How can I see macros in action? Check out Paul’s Macro Video Channel.

“But what is a macro, anyway?”

Macros are computer programs written in the Visual Basic, a language that allows us to create tools that deal with ‘words’, ‘sentences’, ‘paragraphs’, ‘tables’, etc. These tools can do quite complex things such as analysing the text and generating reports of (potential) inconsistencies – which can then be highlighted to bring them to our attention as we read.

Macros can also provide tools to speed up the process of actually editing the text as we go through sentence by sentence. Indeed, anything we do repeatedly has the potential to have a tool created to speed it up, and small time-savings used repeatedly can produce marked efficiency increases. Also, having tools to deal with the nitty-gritty changes leaves us more free to focus on the details that require our editorial skills.