Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Feb 8, 2012, 4:30 pm
Bottom line: Consistency reduces confusion. Always use the official term where it exists. Don’t use terminology variations just because you think your document sounds repetitive – better to be repetitive and clear than to offer synonymous terms and confuse your readers! Your readers will get co...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Feb 7, 2012, 4:30 pm
A document I edited the other day was peppered with hundreds of values followed immediately by the unit of measure (e.g. 5km, 20mm, 50m/s etc.). Our house style follows the Australian Style Manual, which is to have a space between almost every value and its unit of measure (e.g. 5 km, 20 mm, 50 m/s)...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Feb 6, 2012, 4:30 pm
I’m a member of several organizations, some paid, some not. I’m a registered customer with several websites (e.g. Amazon). Some organizations pride themselves on being ‘international’ — they actively encourage members from outside the US/Canada, they use ‘international’ in their promo...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Feb 6, 2012, 3:31 am
Over the several decades I’ve lived on this earth, I’ve attempted to grow veges a number of times. But it’s always ended in disaster of some sort — too much or too little water, bugs that want to thwart my every attempt, a degree in chemistry required to get the soil balance right, the cost ...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Feb 6, 2012, 2:46 am
February is the height of summer here in Western Australia. High temperatures; strong, dry easterly winds; extreme fire danger; total fire bans (including any hot work, BBQs etc.). Or, if you live further north, cyclones (destructive winds, flooding, etc.). FESA is the agency that coordinates all t...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Feb 6, 2012, 2:29 am
We have two very large and very old trees on our property. They are the only substantial trees that would’ve been left after the old farmland was converted into acre blocks. And the previous owners (and original builders) of our house preserved them. They are lovely. But I’ve been a bit concern...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Feb 5, 2012, 4:30 pm
One of the problems with Twitter is that you only have 140 characters in which to deliver your message. That’s also an advantage because you have to hone your writing skills significantly. However, honing your writing often means that the context of your message is lost, with the result that it c...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Feb 5, 2012, 3:55 am
Nothing like throwing us in the deep end! This month’s FMQ challenge was from Diane Gaudynski, and it was feathers!! Feathers aren’t that hard to do, but they are terrifying for most beginning FMQ’ers — me included — which is why I was surprised they were put so early in the year. Howeve...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Feb 2, 2012, 4:30 pm
These notes are to remind me what I did to create an eBook from a Word document in case I have to create more. They are not step-by-step instructions — they are just my notes from my first foray into creating eBooks. Some background: I have an Android phone, so was only able to test on that platf...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Feb 2, 2012, 12:30 am
Having experienced a few cyclones when I lived up north, this isn’t the eye of a cyclone. But it’s a weird radar image from the Bureau of Meteorology, just the same. It looks like there’s some sort of alien force field centred on Rockingham and Mandurah. Everywhere else is copping fair amount...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Feb 1, 2012, 4:30 pm
I couldn’t find an easy way to change the case of a lower case letter after a period using Find/Replace (see Matthew’s 25 January 2012 comment on this blog post). My wildcard skills just aren’t sophisticated enough! However, I did a bit of hunting on the internet and found a couple of macros....
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 31, 2012, 4:30 pm
One of the things I like about Word is that you can specify your own keyboard shortcuts for your macros and for functions that don’t already have a key combination. Or you can modify those that are already assigned in Word (though I wouldn’t advise it, because if you have to reinstall Word or yo...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 30, 2012, 4:30 pm
One of the challenges I got the other day was to add second and third levels to the existing Level 1 Appendix headings in the client’s template. After some trial and error, I got it to work. These instructions are for Word 2007, but they should work similarly in Word 2010. This is not a simple p...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 29, 2012, 4:30 pm
I read about a handy little app in a computer magazine the other day. So I went to the website, where I watched a video of what it does. I wanted to find out more about the company behind it, so I went to the About section (which told me NOTHING about the history of the company or the people behind...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 26, 2012, 4:30 pm
Wow. I work with a health, safety and environment team and we got these pictures from one of the safety guys. It seems this accident happened mid-December 2011 in the Pilbara region of Western Australia, and it involved a truck driver delivering oil/gas pipeline casings to a storage area. While this...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 25, 2012, 4:30 pm
One of the team I work with asked: Please could you provide us with some guidance on when to use and not to use capital letters. I would expect to use capitals for proper nouns, defined terms in a legal document, position titles, acronyms, symbols for chemical elements and the first word of each se...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 24, 2012, 4:30 pm
Another post on the inequities of Kindle books available on Amazon… One of the list members of a tech writer discussion list I’m on, notified the group that The Yahoo! Style Guide: Writing for an Online Audience is only $1.99 in Kindle edition on Amazon. Nice. Kindle is all about digital distr...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 23, 2012, 4:30 pm
‘Snapped’ at a local restaurant: Filed under: Humor
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 22, 2012, 4:30 pm
I’m heading off to the US in less than six weeks, and am taking my smartphone with me. I want to use it as my modem for my laptop where there isn’t free WiFi (yeah, I need to figure out how to do that…), so I need to get a SIM that is either a US SIM or a global SIM. I’m on a contract with T...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Jan 21, 2012, 10:26 pm
Some of the horses I see on my morning walk. This paddock has about 13. The ‘headbands’ are used to keep the flies out of their eyes and thus stop infection. The eye parts are shadecloth-type mesh. Filed under: Life stuff
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 19, 2012, 4:30 pm
Back in 2008 I had a little rant about Adobe’s pricing model for countries outside the US, specifically Australia. Since then I’ve spoken to several Adobe employees at conferences in the US about this, but have received no satisfactory answer as to why there is such a discrepancy between the pri...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 16, 2012, 4:30 pm
Long-time blog reader, client, and good guy, J, shared these photos with me that he took while driving through South Australia on his way back to Perth, Western Australia. It seems they’re part of a road safety campaign, though it’s a concern that ‘political correctness’ (a oxymoron if ever...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 15, 2012, 4:30 pm
I helped someone out on this blog a while ago. Because I couldn’t easily diagnose her Word 2003 problem based on the comments on the post, I asked her to email the document to me so I could see what was going on (I rarely do this, but it was very hard to diagnose based on what she said). I was abl...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 12, 2012, 4:30 pm
What on earth was Adobe thinking when they decided to remove the search from the Adobe Reader toolbar (and Acrobat too, for that matter)? Someone, somewhere decided that Adobe Reader X (that’s 10 for those of you counting) wouldn’t have a search box (or Find in their terminology), as previous v...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 9, 2012, 4:30 pm
I use Microsoft Lync on my client’s computer when I’m linked in to their office via VPN. However, it’s baffled me as to why Lync often changes my status to Busy or Busy — In a meeting without my permission. I wanted to find out why it does this and how I can stop it from doing so. I’d alr...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 8, 2012, 4:30 pm
I think this might only apply to Windows XP as I can’t recall seeing a similar message in Vista. One of the small annoyances is the little popup that appears every so often telling me I have unused icons on my desktop and do I want to delete them. Well, no, I don’t. I know what I have on my de...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Jan 7, 2012, 2:30 am
I had fun practising free motion leaves, the first ‘lesson’ in the 2012 FMQ Challenge. I think I improved, and I enjoyed trying some thread enhancements I’d never done before. I used my Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen to do the quilting, and except for the final practice piece, all practice sand...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 5, 2012, 4:30 pm
Your document has varying numbers of spaces between words — for example, 2, 3, 4 etc. spaces instead of just one space. You want to be able to find all multiple spaces after any word and replace them with a single space in one Find/Replace action. NOTE: This find/replace DOES NOT look for multipl...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 4, 2012, 4:30 pm
Your document has varying numbers of spaces before a number string — for example, 2, 3, 4 etc. spaces before a number like 85. You want to be able to find all multiple spaces before a numeral and replace them with a single space in one Find/Replace action. Here’s how to do it. Open Word’s Fi...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 3, 2012, 4:30 pm
Your document has varying numbers of spaces after a punctuation mark — for example, 2, 3, 4 etc. spaces after a semicolon, colon, period, comma etc. You want to be able to find all multiple spaces after a defined punctuation character and replace them with a single space in one Find/Replace action...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Jan 1, 2012, 4:30 pm
The last day of 2011 started innocently enough. It was a weekend, and one of the last days of my Christmas/New Year break. I was pretty relaxed… Then I got an email from PayPal with We’ve limited your PayPal account in the subject line. (My highlights: I can’t send or withdraw funds, so in e...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Dec 31, 2011, 6:52 pm
WordPress.com compiled a summary report of this blog’s stats for 2011. It’s here: http://sandgroper14.wordpress.com/2011/annual-report/ I like that the number of visitors to this blog would have filled the Sydney Opera House 19 times over Filed under: Blogging
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Dec 23, 2011, 9:00 pm
I’ve signed up for the Free Motion Quilting Quilting Challenge here: http://sewcalgal.blogspot.com/p/free-motion-quilt-challenge.html I’ve never done anything like this before — I’ve always directed myself, not had the directions given to me, so that will be a challenge in itself! Two fri...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Dec 23, 2011, 6:21 pm
I’ve been very slack about putting up screen shots of Etsy Treasuries my items have been featured in. In fact, it’s March 2011 since I put up a gallery! So here they are (click on a small image to show it full size): Filed under: Quilts and fabric stuff
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Dec 4, 2011, 3:10 am
I’ve got a birthday coming up in a week or two, but as it’s really close to Christmas and my Mum’s 80th birthday, we decided to celebrate my birthday early. How? By driving 700 km for a steak dinner! Actually, it was a 756 km round trip (for those in the US, that’s about 400 miles.) Was it ...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 30, 2011, 5:30 pm
Each week or so, I try to email my team of authors a writing tip that focuses on typical errors I find in some of their writing. Last week’s tip was on parallel structure. I’ve reproduced it here after removing any identifying information. The examples are from the oil and gas industry, but the ...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 27, 2011, 5:30 pm
Seen in a safety and risk assessment document I’ve been editing: The Explosion Study assessed several mitigation options to reduce the blast effects on the Administration Buildings, including relocation, water deluge, and installing a blast wall. The Administration Building was relocated as a res...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 26, 2011, 5:30 pm
I add a lot of comments to the documents I edit in Word. And I finally went hunting for a keyboard shortcut for adding a comment balloon. It’s obscure and not listed on the tooltip for the ‘New Comment’ icon on the Review ribbon in Word 2007 (or later). And even looking for it in the Word Opti...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Oct 20, 2011, 12:50 am
It was my turn to set the challenge for 2012, which I revealed at our quilting retreat in early October. I chose the poem ‘Core of my heart (My Country)’ by Dorothea Mackellar, from which comes the song ‘I love a sunburnt country’. There’s plenty of inspiration in that poem! The rules an...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 19, 2011, 5:30 pm
A fellow tech writer/editor asked for my advice a few weeks ago. Someone she knows had asked her about editing his PhD thesis, and she wanted some idea from me as to what she should charge. The brief was: Review of a PhD science student thesis (approximately 200 pages) where English is a second la...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 17, 2011, 5:30 pm
I live in Western Australia and our state’s official abbreviation is ‘WA’, which also happens to be the official abbreviation for the state of Washington in the US. In times gone by, I have received mail from another country that’s gone via Washington state before being redirected by some c...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 16, 2011, 5:30 pm
As a follow-up to my post about setting the language for all elements of a Word document, except styles, here’s how you set the language for a style. Do this in the template and it will apply to all documents you create from that template. You have to set the language one style at a time. If you ...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Oct 15, 2011, 4:55 am
One of the delights of our annual retreat is seeing how the other gals met the challenge set the previous year. Their friendship and general awesomeness is pretty great too , but this post will just focus on the quilts made by the five of us to meet the monochromatic challenge set by Flora. Consid...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Oct 15, 2011, 12:31 am
I got back to my challenge quilt in April after trying out a Handi Quilter Sweet Sixteen machine at the Eleanor Burns Quilting Academy in California, and after my most generous friend Bobbie lent me hers for two weeks. I actually did all the quilting on it using Bobbie’s machine, then bought my ve...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Oct 15, 2011, 12:05 am
After deciding on the design, the colour, and the fabrics, then doing all the cutting, it was time to start putting the main part of the quilt top together. I stitched a sashing strip to one side of all the squares in a each row (70 squares in total). I chain pieced these so that I kept the squares...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on At Random - Oct 15, 2011, 12:00 am
I wrote this post in November 2010, knowing it wouldn’t be published until late September/early October 2011, AFTER we’ve had our quilting retreat at Bobbie’s house. The reason: Our challenge piece is to remain secret from the other ladies — which is part of the fun of the challenge! Flora ...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 13, 2011, 5:30 pm
I needed to set the language for all elements of a Word 2007 template to English (Australia). I could set the language for the body of the document easily enough via a simple macro, but this didn’t set the language for the headers, footers, text boxes, or the styles (yes, you can set the language ...
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 10, 2011, 5:26 pm
Two of my favorite things — commas and chameleons! Spotted on the internet (sorry, no source for this — if you know where it’s from, let me know so I can attribute it correctly). Filed under: Grammar & Punctuation, Humor
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 9, 2011, 5:30 pm
Here’s a strange one. My client had done a mail merge, but when he printed the letters, the merged fields in the header on page 2 of the 2-page letter were printed as field names, not as the field data. He said that the letters looked fine in the preview in Word 2007, but they didn’t print fine....
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Rhonda B. posted an article on CyberText Newsletter - Oct 6, 2011, 5:30 pm
From Chuck Green’s Ideabook (http://www.ideabook.com) newsletter came this: Wordmark is wonderful online tool that allows you to see words and phrases in all of the typefaces loaded on your computer. So, for example, I can type in “ideabook” and see it rendered in all of the hundreds of the t...
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