Consistency: Pick one. Stick with it.

Bottom line:

• Consistency reduces confusion.
• Always use the official term where it exists.
• Don’t use terminology variations just because you think your document sounds repetitive – better to be repetitive and clear than to offer synonymous terms and confuse your readers!

Your readers will get confused if you aren’t consistent in the terminology you use in your documents. Does phrase A mean the same as phrase B? If the words are similar, but not quite the same, are they different things or the same thing? If your reader has to hesitate to figure it out, invariably that means that you’ve confused them. If the words mean the same thing, then you must use the same term for it throughout the document. And always use your organization’s official version of the term, if one exists.

Let me give you some examples of inconsistent words/phrases from some documents I’ve edited recently:

Example 1: ‘Tenets of Operation’ and ‘Tenets of Operational Excellence’ – same or different?

Example 2: The author used these multiple variations in just three pages: ‘workplace participation’, ‘workplace involvement’, ‘workplace consultation’, and ‘workplace engagement’. I wondered whether the author meant these were different things or just one thing. While these phrases *could* mean different things, in the context of what I read they seemed to refer to the same thing.

Example 3: Variations of these terms: ‘LNG Plant’, ‘Gas Treatment Plant’, ‘process plant’. If they are the same thing, then use the same (official) term throughout the document.

Example 4: ‘Construction Camp’ and ‘Construction Village’ – same or different? Again, use the official term, if it exists.

Example 5: Inconsistency is not just seen in the terms used, but also in how they are written: ‘iHAZID’ and ‘IHAZID’ and ‘HAZID’ – same or different? Should the first ‘i’ be capitalized or not? Is the ‘i’ needed?

Where no official term exists, pick one way to write the term and stick with that throughout the document.

Remember: Consistency reduces confusion.

See also:

• Five ways consistency matters (by Geoff Hart): http://www.intelligentediting.com/consistencymatters.aspx

[Link last checked February 2012]

Word: Insert a space between a number and a letter

A document I edited the other day was peppered with hundreds of values followed immediately by the unit of measure (e.g. 5km, 20mm, 50m/s etc.). Our house style follows the Australian Style Manual, which is to have a space between almost every value and its unit of measure (e.g. 5 km, 20 mm, 50 m/s).

While I could run several find and replace (F/R) passes looking for various measurement units (e.g. km) and then replacing them with a space followed by the measurement unit, there were a LOT of different units used and some, such as ‘m’ for meter, weren’t easy to catch using the normal F/R methods — either that, or I caught more than I wanted and ended up with two spaces in front of any word starting with ‘m’. Doing 20+ passes of F/R hoping to get most of the measurement units didn’t seem like a lot of fun.

So I applied some of the knowledge I’ve learned recently about wildcard F/R to catch them all. I still had to replace them one at a time as I needed to avoid adding a space between legitimate instances of numbers followed by a letter (e.g. chemical symbols such as H₂S). But using the wildcard search made it much easier to find every instance of a number followed immediately by a letter, and replace the relevant ones with the same number followed by a space then the same letter.

Here’s how:

1. Open Word’s Find and Replace dialog box (Ctrl+H).
2. Click More to show more options.
   
3. Select the Use wildcards check box.
   
4. In the Find what field, type: ([0-9])([A-z])
5. In the Replace with field, type: \1 \2
   Note: There’s ONE space immediately after the \1, so make sure you type that too.
6. Click Find Next, then click Replace to insert a space into each one that’s relevant. Repeat until you’ve done them all.

Explanation for how this works:

• ([0-9]) looks for any numeral. This string defines the first section of the Find. Because you are using wildcards, you need to surround the characters you want to find in parentheses. The square brackets indicate a range — in this case any numeral from 0 to 9 will be found.
• ([A-z]) looks for any letter, upper or lower case. This string defines the second section of the Find. Again, you define the range of letters to be found with square brackets; the [A-z] means any upper case letter from A through the lower case letters to z.
• \1 replaces the first part of the wildcard string with itself. In other words, the numeral found is replaced with itself, so no change apparently occurs.
• The single space after \1 replaces adds a space between the two parts found.
• \2 replaces the second part of the wildcard string with itself. In other words, the letter found is replaced with itself, so no change apparently occurs.

However, what I couldn’t figure out how to do was make the space I inserted a non-breaking space. In a normal F/R, I’d use ^s for a non-breaking space, but I couldn’t figure out how to add that successfully to the Replace field. Anything I tried just put in ^s or (^s) as text, NOT as a non-breaking space. Anyone know how?

See also:

• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/word-find-and-replace-any-number-of-spaces/
• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/word-replace-excess-spaces/
• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2008/06/28/word-remove-excess-characters/
• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/01/04/word-find-and-replace-multiple-spaces-after-a-punctuation-mark/
• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/01/05/word-find-and-replace-multiple-spaces-before-a-number/
• http://cybertext.wordpress.com/2012/01/06/word-find-and-replace-multiple-spaces-between-words/

[Links last checked August 2012]

Prize offerings

I’m a member of several organizations, some paid, some not. I’m a registered customer with several websites (e.g. Amazon).

Some organizations pride themselves on being ‘international’ — they actively encourage members from outside the US/Canada, they use ‘international’ in their promotional material, and they ‘talk the talk’.

But when it comes to it, ‘international’ really has no meaning for them.

Amazon, for example, has offers, prizes, deals, and promotions that are only available to US citizens, and/or those with a US address (in some cases, only the continental US states) and credit card number. Yet they send out blanket emails, promos etc. to ALL their customers advising them of these deals. It’s only when you read the (very) fine print that you find out that, despite getting the offer, you’re excluded from participating or taking advantage of the deal. I’m not picking on Amazon here — many companies do the same thing.

So it was with surprise that I saw that STC (Society for Technical Communication) was trying to entice members who haven’t renewed yet with an entry to a prize draw to win an HDTV with Blu-ray player:

I was curious. I’m not interested in winning this prize (or in renewing my membership), but now I was curious to see how a supposedly ‘international’ organization was going to treat their non US/Canadian members with such a prize. STC sure don’t have a good track record to date in how they treat their international members, in my opinion, which is the main reason I won’t be renewing.

So I looked further. There is no fine print to tell me if this offer is only available to US/Canadian members, or if it’s available to the entire membership. Clicking the link just took me to the ‘benefits of renewal’ web page with no information about this prize. Where are the ‘terms and conditions’ for this prize on their website?

I have a lot of unanswered questions about this ‘prize’:

• Is entry to the prize draw available to ALL renewing members, no matter where they live?
• If so, and if a non US/Canadian member wins the prize, will STC pay for the (substantial) international shipping charges, customs charges, import duties and taxes?
• Will STC pay for the electricity transformer/adaptors needed to use these appliances outside the US/Canada? Every country has different voltages and pin connectors (e.g. you plug a 110V appliance from the US into the Australian 240V electricity system with just an adaptor and without a transformer and you’re likely to fry the appliance).
• Will STC substitute the prize if it is won by someone who lives in a region of the world without high definition television?

Yet another ‘bright idea’ from someone within STC to attract back members, whereas all they are doing is confirming — yet again — they they AREN’T an international organization, despite promoting that they are.

Context is everything

One of the problems with Twitter is that you only have 140 characters in which to deliver your message. That’s also an advantage because you have to hone your writing skills significantly.

However, honing your writing often means that the context of your message is lost, with the result that it can be misinterpreted. Badly.

The other thing with Twitter messages is that you don’t always know how your message will be interpreted by your followers in other countries, or who speak other languages. Some words (particularly words that are colloquial, vernacular, or location-specific) just get lost in translation or are misinterpreted in ways you can’t imagine.

All this is a preamble to a public Tweet I read from someone I follow the other day (no names, of course!). She lives in the US; I live in Australia.

Here’s her original Tweet:

Within minutes, quite a number of her followers from the UK, Australia, and other parts of US, contacted her directly to see if she meant what we thought she meant, especially in relation to the second sentence. ;-)

Shortly after, she Tweeted this:

As I said, context is everything!

Creating an eBook from a Word document

These notes are to remind me what I did to create an eBook from a Word document in case I have to create more. They are not step-by-step instructions — they are just my notes from my first foray into creating eBooks.

Some background: I have an Android phone, so was only able to test on that platform.

Process

1. Format the Word document so that it uses Heading styles for each section. Minimal formatting elsewhere.
2. Save the Word doc as filtered HTML.
3. Optional: Clean up the resulting HTML using Word Cleaner (use the Clean up existing Word HTML files conversion option; however, this can strip the heading information from the document and re-applying that and other styles may not be worth the effort).
4. Use Sigil to create the initial ePub book from the filtered HTML output from Word.
5. Use Sigil to clean up the output, add a table of contents, etc.
6. Use Calibre to create ePub and other eBook formats, add a cover page and picture, if necessary.
7. Test the resulting output in the Calibre reader.
8. Republish the ePub in Calibre and/or republish to other formats too (e.g. MOBI for Kindle).
9. Test on various devices/readers.

If you’re using an Android phone, you can test the ePub and MOBI formats in the Aldiko and Kindle apps. However, for Kindle on Android you may have to plug the phone into your computer as a hard drive and transfer the MOBI document to the Kindle folder. I found that the Kindle app for Android wouldn’t open a MOBI file transferred via Bluetooth or DropBox, but would open it if I transferred it. The ePub version worked straight away in Aldiko.

Potential issues with Word documents when converted to MOBI and viewed on Kindle

Some of these potential issues could be corrected with adjustments to the CSS; however, for these initial tests, I didn’t do that as I wanted to see how easily it was to create eBooks ‘out of the box’.

• Bulletted lists: May not display correctly. The bullet is preserved, but the indentation is a little out-of-whack.
• Tables: The data displays, but cell background colors display as little colored markers, instead of the color filling the cell background. The test table I used had 5 columns — any more and it would struggle to display them all. Heading row repeat is not preserved so as you scroll pages for a long table, there are no headings at the top of the page to tell you what data you’re looking at.
• Justification: The text is fully justified, even though the Word document was left justified.
• Figures: Display as smallish thumbnail size images and they can’t be resized.
• Fonts: The font displayed is a serif font, even though the Word document used Calibri (sans serif) for the base font and Cambria (serif) for the headings. Heading and caption colors and sizes preserved. Paragraph indent (none) preserved and paragraph leading preserved too.

Potential issues with Word documents when converted to ePub and viewed on Aldiko

Some of these potential issues could be corrected with adjustments to the CSS; however, for these initial tests, I didn’t do that as I wanted to see how easily it was to create eBooks ‘out of the box’.

• Heading fonts: Not preserved. These were Cambria, blue in the original Word document, but became black (unknown serif font) in the ePub version.
• Caption fonts for figures and tables: Became normal text. Some ended up with a hyperlink (as did the main Heading 1) and I have no idea why.
• Figures: Display as smallish thumbnail size images and they can’t be resized.
• Justification: The text is fully justified, even though the Word document was left justified.
• Paragraphs: First lines were indented slightly, even though they weren’t in the original Word document. Paragraph leading not preserved.
• Tables: Go off the ‘page’. Reducing the displayed text size helped, but you wouldn’t want to have extensive tables in your original document. No colors displayed for heading rows, banded rows, borders etc — all white background and black borders.

Tools I used

• Sigil (free; donations accepted): http://code.google.com/p/sigil/
• Calibre (free; donations accepted): http://calibre-ebook.com/
• Word Cleaner (US$99): http://www.convertwordtohtml.com/
• Aldiko (free app; $2.99 for Premium version of app): http://www.aldiko.com/
• Kindle app for PCs, phones, tablets (free): http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=sa_menu_karl3?ie=UTF8&docId=1000493771

See also:

• Office documents on your ebook reader: http://office-watch.com/t/n.aspx?a=1600&z=12

[Links last checked January 2012]

Word: Change case after a period

I couldn’t find an easy way to change the case of a lower case letter after a period using Find/Replace (see Matthew’s 25 January 2012 comment on this blog post). My wildcard skills just aren’t sophisticated enough!

However, I did a bit of hunting on the internet and found a couple of macros. I modified them slightly and this one below is the result.

Full kudos for this macro goes to and DonMacnaughto and Lene Fredborg (http://www.microsoft-word-answers.com/microsoft/Word-VBA/29231545/repeatedly-change-first-letter-after-periodblank-to-uppercase.aspx).

Please note: Be sure that this is what you want to do. I suggest you think about it before trying it (and make a backup of your document!), as it will convert ANY letter after a period followed by a space to a capital letter. While that may be fine in most circumstances, you’ll need to watch for things like ‘e.g.’, ‘i.e.’, ‘etc.’, and any abbreviation/acronym that has periods, for example. Make sure that’s what you want.

Sub ChangeCaseAfterPeriod()

With ActiveDocument.Content.Find
   .Text = ". "
   .Forward = True
   .Wrap = wdFindStop
   .Format = False
   .MatchCase = False
   .MatchWholeWord = False
   .MatchWildcards = False
   .MatchSoundsLike = False
   .MatchAllWordForms = False

Do While .Execute = True
With .Parent
'Include the next character
   .End = .End + 1
'Change to uppercase
   .Case = wdUpperCase
'Make sure to move on to next ". "
   .Start = .End
End With
Loop
End With

End Sub

[Links last checked January 2012]

Excel doesn’t allow you to view or specify keyboard shortcuts

One of the things I like about Word is that you can specify your own keyboard shortcuts for your macros and for functions that don’t already have a key combination. Or you can modify those that are already assigned in Word (though I wouldn’t advise it, because if you have to reinstall Word or you use someone else’s machine your keyboard shortcuts won’t work the same as the ones you’ve set up for your installation of Word).

Assigning keyboard shortcuts has been a feature in Word for years, and I just assumed that the other Office products would have similar functionality. Not so. I was alerted to this lack because of a comment on one of my blog posts — Ctrl+Shift+C activates the Format Painter in Word, but doesn’t do so in Excel, even though Excel also has the Format Painter function.

Microsoft Excel 2010 (and likely earlier versions), does NOT have any option available to view existing key combinations or to create your own. And on further investigation nor does PowerPoint 2010, Visio 2010, or Outlook 2010 (I didn’t check all the Office programs).

For example, here’s the Word 2010 screen with the option to assign a keyboard shortcut (found under File > Options > Customize Ribbon):

Word 2010 allows you to assign a keyboard shortcut

And here’s the same screen in Excel 2010 — nothing!:

Excel 2010 doesn't let you to assign a keyboard shortcut

I think this is a really big oversight by the Microsoft Office team. Those who use these products all day, every day, can be incredibly efficient using keystrokes instead of the mouse. I can’t believe that Microsoft has denied users the ability to add their own to existing functions.

Note: I understand that you can still assign a keyboard shortcut to a macro you create in Excel etc.

See also:

• http://superuser.com/questions/212583/how-do-you-customize-excel-2010-keyboard-shortcuts
• http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/office/forum/office_2010-customize/excel-2010-customize-keyboard-shortcuts/6b707c53-cbca-451e-8343-86b719e418ca

[Links last checked January 2012]