In mid-November, I edited a scientific literature review for a researcher at a well-known university. It was very interesting, but in editing it, I was very thankful that I know and use macros (thank you, Jennifer Yankopoulus for teaching macros to me and Paul Beverley for programming them in Visual Basic).

For those of you who do not know what macros are, they are shortcuts for performing certain actions in MS Word. They save time, energy, and your clients’ money. I have even heard it said on LinkedIn that it is considered unprofessional not to use them. In the summer of 2022, I took a course in macros through the Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) and it was one of the best investments of my time ever.

So which macros proved to be the most useful in the editing of this literature review?

*GoogleFetch: This is undoubtedly my favorite macro and among the most useful in this project. You only have to place the cursor on the word (or highlight the term) which you want Google to look up, and press your keyboard shortcut (in my case, it’s Ctrl+Alt+G). Presto! Google opens with a list of links for that term.

*CapperMax and CapperMin: These two macros are useful in formatting section headlines according to some style guides (such as APA 7, which I was using). You highlight the headline and press the keyboard shortcut for either CapperMax (which places the headline in title case) or CapperMin (which places it in sentence case).

*CaseThisWordJumpNextWord: This macro changes the case of the word on which the cursor is placed (e.g., from uppercase to lowercase). The cursor then automatically jumps to the next word. This is very useful for terms which are capitalized and should not be.

*TextToNumber and NumberToText: These two macros deal with the presentation of numbers. TextToNumber changes a number written out in text (“twenty-three”) to a numeral (“23”), while NumberToText changes a numeral to a text number. Since APA 7 requires certain numbers to be written out as text and others to be represented as numerals, this is a very handy macro to have.

*AcronymDefinitionLister: This macro makes a list (in a separate Word document) of acronyms used in the document and their definitions. This saves a lot of time.

If you use macros, which did you use most in your last project?