Productivity tips for MS Word: Keyboard shortcuts, the QAT and custom ribbons, and a demo of some macros for productivity

Productivity tips for MS Word: Keyboard shortcuts, the QAT and custom ribbons, and a demo of some basic macros

Join PEG for a webinar about how to increase your productivity when using Microsoft Word. We will provide various tips and tricks for speeding up your work and saving your mouse hand while editing!

Date: Tuesday, 18 February 2025

Time: 18:00–20:00

Place: Online (Zoom meeting)

Facilitators: Sally Hofmeyr and Kevin Walker

Level: Beginner

CPD hours: PEG members will earn CPD hours according to the criteria published on the PEG website. Attendees of the live presentation will receive a certificate confirming their attendance and the duration of the webinar. Those who are unable to attend the webinar live may submit their receipt as proof of having received the recording.

Prerequisites/foundational knowledge: None (not even about macros!)

Pre-webinar materials: None.

About our facilitators

Kevin Walker started his long and happy relationship with the Microsoft Office suite during a ‘misspent youth’, messing about on the family computer while his friends were probably playing outside in the sunshine. Most of his MS Word learning has been guided by curiosity (‘What does this button do?!’), the belief that ‘there must be a (better) way to do that’, lots of Googling, and the subsequent joy in finding solutions to and workarounds for tricky issues. He is passionate about sharing these skills with others and helping them to resolve their own prickly problems.

Sally Hofmeyr studied ecology, ornithology and conservation, but she was never convinced that academia was the right place for her, despite going as far as doing two postdocs. Between postdocs, she started doing freelance academic editing for a small online company (Uni-edit) to bring in some extra money while she worked out what to do next. By the time the second postdoc had come to an end, she had found her niche: editing! Since 2016, Sally has been a senior editor for Uni-edit; in this role she edits, provides training and feedback to editors and translators, and helps with running the business. The editing she does is primarily of academic articles in the biological sciences that are written by non-first-language speakers of English or translated into English in-house. She has also done some editing of educational material and some narrative nonfiction proofreading projects for a publisher. She keeps a toe in the waters of real-life academia by doing ornithological fieldwork from time to time, which provides a welcome break from the computer. She has also been working part-time at the University of Cape Town in a supporting role since April 2023. Sally has been a member of PEG since late 2017; in 2020 she qualified as an Accredited Text Editor (English).

About the webinar

The webinar will cover aspects of working in Word that are slightly ‘behind the scenes’ and may not be obvious to many Word users – or if users know of them, they may find them a little scary. Take heart: they really are very easy to master, and we promise they will make your editing life easier! We will cover skills like using keyboard shortcuts; setting up your own keyboard shortcuts for actions you perform frequently; creating custom menus in the Ribbon; customising your Quick Access Toolbar (QAT); and backing up or transferring your settings to another machine. We will also perform a quick demo of some macros you may find useful, just to give you some idea of what’s possible. (Note that we will not demonstrate how to install or create macros; however, the macros we will demonstrate are all available online. We recommend purchasing a recording of a past macros webinar if you would like to learn this skill – please contact webinars@editors.org.za for past recordings).

Cost

¹Association of Southern African Indexers and Bibliographers (ASAIB), Professional Journalists’ Association of South Africa (ProJourn), Southern African Freelancers’ Association (SAFREA), South African Science Journalists’ Association (SASJA), the South African Translators’ Institute (SATI), Publishers’ Association of South Africa (PASA), Society of English-language professionals in the Netherlands (SENSE), Institute of Professional Editors Limited (IPEd), Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading (CIEP), Editorial Freelancers Association (EFA) and Nordic Editors and Translators (NEaT).

Please register by completing and emailing the registration form.

Deadline for registrations: 12:00 on Saturday, 15 February.