OK, so “hack” isn’t really the right word for it. I’m not doing anything Microsoft doesn’t want me to be doing.

And, spoiler alert: I don’t know how to change Word’s default language to Klingon or turn my computer into an orbital station or anything (though this guy can help you with that last one).

What I do know is that there’s a lot hidden beneath the surface of the Find and Replace tool that I’ve found handy in my own writing and editing.

Whether you’re after efficiency or polish, these Microsoft Word hacks can help you wrangle your manuscript into shape quickly, without spending unnecessary hours tweaking everything manually. Happy hacking!

1. Nonbreaking Space

First, quick lesson on ellipses: When you type three periods into Word (and many other word processors), they connect together magically as one character; one tap of the “delete” key clears the whole set. This single-character ellipsis (…) is especially handy when you reach the end of the line, as you don’t want a line to break in the middle of it.

But here’s the kicker: that tightly spaced ellipsis shouldn’t actually appear in the book in published form. Grab one off your shelf and you’ll likely find—if the book’s editor adhered to the Chicago Manual of Style—that ellipses are spaced a little more . . . like this. (Check out a few examples from Chicago chapter 13, if you’ve got one handy.)

But now that Word considers each period its own character again, what’s to stop the whole thing from breaking apart at the end of a line?

Nonbreaking spaces to the rescue.

Since you want to allow a line break before or after the ellipsis, but not in the middle, you’ll want to convert the two regular interior spaces to nonbreaking spaces. Here’s how.

Hit the space bar while holding down Ctrl and Shift with one or two fingers where you want a nonbreaking space to appear. To check that it worked, simply toggle from Hide to Show by clicking the toolbar button that looks like a paragraph symbol, and you’ll see something like this:

While regular old spaces appear as black dots (grey in Word for Mac), nonbreaking spaces look like little open circles. Ta-da!

Now, when you reach the end of a line, Word will keep all the marks together, allowing a break either before or after the entire thing. (And if it’s the final character in a line, just throw another nonbreaking space between it and the word before it, and you’ll never end up with rogue ellipses on their own lines again!)

2. Compare

It’s happened to every editor. Turn the Track Changes off for one reason or another (to make minor global changes that would only serve to muddy the author’s edit-review experience) and proceed happily along with the work.

Until you suddenly realize you forgot to turn Track Changes back on, and you’ve just been meddling with an author’s manuscript in ways he or she will never be able to see.

Before you know it, you’ve ripped most of your hair out, written your author a hasty apology, thrown your belongings up on Craigslist, and defected somewhere sunny, doomed to a life of marking up menus at expat bars and twitching every time you see a notebook.

Don’t do it. There is hope.

Assuming you have a copy of the original (which of course you do, right?), your problems are solved. Simply navigate to the Review tab and choose Compare, and all of your changes will be retroactively tracked.

You can save a new document, combine it with the partially-tracked document you’re working on, even decide whether to track changes by the word or by the letter. As long as you have something to compare the untracked edited document to, you’re in good shape.

In fact, I suggest saving a second “original” copy, after you’ve made any global changes from the original. That way, if you do forget to click that tracking button, the Compare feature won’t track those minor tweaks you meant to do in the background.

3. Find and Replace

Sure, you can change a character’s name throughout the document and switch double spaces to single and track down filler words. You already know that. But if you’ve never dug into the advanced options, prepare for your mind to be blown by the possibilities.

Hit Ctrl+F and toggle to Advanced Find and there you are. You’ve been here before, but here are some of my favorite ways to use this tool to manipulate a manuscript.

Remove extra spaces before or after paragraphs

Assuming your indents are formatted properly (read: not created manually with tabs or spaces), and taking my underscores as regular spaces, try this find and replace option:

Find: ^p_  /  Replace: ^p

The ^p stands for standard paragraph spaces (the enter key), and inconsistent indents are annoying. Using the above characters, you should be able to remove any extra spaces that may have snuck in between a paragraph indent and the first word of the new line.

(You can even run another with the space before the paragraph to cut down on random spaces at the end of lines; not as crucial or noticeable, but invisible or not, why not clear them out of there, since it’s so easy?)

Keep in mind, however, that there are other ways to start a new line that won’t be uncovered by ^p, so running these searches doesn’t guarantee total paragraph satisfaction. But, unless you’ve been mashing extra keys when you hit Enter or moving text from one word processor to another, this should be relatively effective.

(Hint: This works best after you’ve converted double spaces to single—another Chicago standard.)

Straight Quotes to Curly

Microsoft Word does a nice job of formatting quotes to curl the right way as you type, but again if you’re copying and pasting text in from anywhere else—especially a blog post or email—you might end up with straight opening and closing quotes (ones that point straight down and look exactly the same).

Luckily, there’s a ridiculously easy way to deal with that in two simple searches:

Find: ‘  /  Replace: ‘
Find: “  /  Replace: “

Yep, you read that right: search for both single and double quotes and replace them with…themselves.

Why? When Word does these searches, it picks up on both left- and right-facing marks, almost as if it reads them as straight—but it replaces them with curly quotes by automatically formatting them as facing left or facing right, depending on the surrounding text. Voilà!

This can save a ton of time by saving you from manually converting each quotation mark or apostrophe every time you come across a straight one. Just pay extra attention to contractions like ’em that ought to have a left-facing mark (like any other contraction, right?), as Word will interpret any apostrophe following a space as a single opening quote and flip the thing around.

“More”

I’ll let you dig around in this one, but make sure you check out everything available under the “More” option of the Find and Replace tool. You can search for individual formatting elements, not just words and characters (think font, style, and case, for starters).

 

If you haven’t yet made the switch, now’s a better time than ever to purchase Microsoft Word (affiliate link)—it’s just $6.99/month, and student discounts are available. Thanks, Microsoft!