Month: July 2010

by Jennie Ruby

Editing continues to be one of the last processes in writing and publishing to be done on a computer. I still meet editors who have never tracked a change or typed a comment in Word. They are writing their corrections on a printout and later making the corrections to their document. Perhaps for the same reason that eBooks may never obliterate print publishing, there is just something easier about the pencil-paper interface than the keyboard-touchpad/mouse method. But the gap is closing.

For one thing, editors feel that seeing printed sheets of paper gives a more direct feel for the length and organization of a piece of writing. But today's computer monitors are generally large enough to display a full page at readable size. I recently taught a group of accountants who each had two wide-screen monitors set up in portrait orientation so that they could view two legal-size documents side by side.

A second problem is the clarity of the marking. When I started developing procedures for electronic editing in the 1980s, no word processor had a method for showing the changes to be made to a document. We used a little program called Red Pencil, which accepted only ASCII files and used graphical marks mimicking handwritten editing marks to indicate changes to text. When WordPerfect came out with their "redlining" feature, I jumped on it, but stick-in-the-mud reviewers and authors balked, claiming the marked up text was hard to read. I still hear this complaint now about Word's tracked changes, but when the alternative is some people's handwriting, the underlines, strikethroughs and balloons suddenly look a little better.

For those who still like to see the insert carat and strikethrough deletions, Adobe Acrobat's Text Edits tool does the trick, mimicking, like the old Red Pencil program, the hand-written carat symbol with inserted text in a separate pop-up note.

One of the last problems to be solved in tracked changes was how to mark text that was moved. Up through Word 2003, moved text appeared as deleted in one place and inserted in another. Word 2007 and 2010 solve that with an elegant green double-strikethrough and double-underline format with links between the moved from and moved to locations.

With the variety of on-screen editing tools now available, with the ease of emailing rather than faxing or mailing documents, and with the time savings that electronic editing and review provide, surely every office can find a way to move its reviewing and editing processes to the screen. Only the final proofreading stage for a print document need be done on paper.

I would love to hear your experiences with paper-and-pencil versus on-screen editing. Are you using Word's track changes? Acrobat's text edits? Acrobat's graphical mark-up tools? Are you using a mixture of electronic tools and paper printouts? Do you fax or email or walk your documents around for review? Do you use a shared network drive, or Sharepoint, or cloud computing to complete your reviews?

We have upcoming classes on all of these methods, and more. Here's to hoping our chewed on, eraserless, hand-sharpened editorial pencil nubs can start gathering dust–at least some of the time.

Are you an eLearning developer who has been tasked with creating an effective voiceover script? If so, consider attending my Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts class. I also teach the Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts class.

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by Jennie Ruby

You have a Word document and you need multiple people to review it and get back to you with changes. Both Microsoft Word and Adobe Acrobat have a "Send for Review" tool. How do you decide which program to use for the review process? Here is an overview of the two programs' tools for reviewing documents.

The Microsoft Word Send for Review tool requires Outlook as your email program. It attaches your Word document to an email message. You send your document to multiple recipients and ask them to review it using Track Changes. Each reviewer completes a review and emails the document back. You then sequentially merge each reviewer's changes and comments into your Word document, where you can resolve conflicts and accept or reject each change.

If your reviewers are slow in getting back to you, you can use Outlook to flag the email message for follow-up for both you and your recipients.

For this kind of review, each of your reviewers must have a compatible version of Word and have a basic knowledge of how to use Track Changes.  What is good about this kind of review is that the document stays in Word, rather than being converted to PDF, and Word's Track Changes feature is absolutely the best for tracking precise changes to text. The Comments tool allows for more extensive discussion of the document.

One negative to this method is that if your reviewers disagree with one another, you may be caught in the middle. Another pitfall is that if your document has a lot of graphics, Track Changes may wreak havoc with your layout.

The Acrobat Send for Review tool enables you to invite multiple reviewers to collaborate on a document using cloud technology. Reviewers' changes are "published" to a shared location, and each reviewer can also check for new comments by others and see them just moments after they have been published. This means multiple reviewers can work either simultaneously or sequentially, and see each others' work. If a reviewer disagrees with a change, she can reply directly to another reviewer's comment, and conflicts can be resolved directly.

Positives for the Acrobat method are that your reviewers need only Acrobat Reader [you must have Acrobat Standard or Pro] and that your layouts and graphic placements cannot be altered during the review process. Built-in help screens guide reviewers on how to use the commenting tools. And at the end of the day, you do not have to manually merge multiple documents: all the comments are there for you to see and manage in either list or graphical form.

Negatives are the added step of creating the PDF for review and the clumsy text editing tools. Also, enthusiastic use of the graphical commenting tools by reviewers can result in a messy and confusing screen.

The huge plus for the Acrobat method, however, is that not just Word documents can be reviewed this way. PowerPoint decks, Excel spreadsheets, In-Design layouts, Visio diagrams, and many other kinds of graphically rich files can be edited in the cloud by reviewers with the free Acrobat Reader.

So which review process should you use? For me the key is whether the document has graphics and a precise layout. If it does, Acrobat is the way to go. But if the main concern is the wording of the text? Go with Word.

Watch for our upcoming classes on editing in the cloud!

Are you an eLearning developer who has been tasked with creating an effective voiceover script? If so, consider attending my Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts class. I also teach the Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts class.

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