I often ask myself what I  have accomplished lately just so I can answer that question myself and feel proud of what I have accomplished.

In December and January, I edited two catalogs from an outdoor furniture company. Each one was approximately 122 pages long. One was called “Trade” (it was aimed at institutions, gardens, museums, and such) and the other “Retail” (it targeted residential customers).

The catalogs were sent to me as PDFs and I used Adobe Acrobat to edit them, placing virtual sticky notes wherever there was an issue. I verified the text, the SKU numbers, the prices, and (in the case of Trade) the dimensions of the products. I have to say that the furniture company did an excellent job putting the catalogs together, because neither one had many issues that needed correcting. I finished Trade on January 6 and Retail on January 24 (they were not sent to me consecutively).

Besides putting out its annual catalogs, the furniture company is in the process of revamping the online descriptions of its products. The descriptions for every single product, which are given to me in Word documents, are run by me before they go live on the company website. Besides editing the text, I must also verify each product’s SKU code on the existing website (the codes are not changing). I also have to check product dimensions if they are given in a description.

What is unique about editing these product descriptions is that I was requested to not, repeat, NOT use the Track Changes feature in MS Word, because my liaison at the company believes it makes things too messy. (There’s something to be said for that…) I am currently plugging away at the product descriptions. Some are one or two pages, others 20 or 30, depending on the sizes of the furniture collections.

What have you accomplished lately?