Online translating/editing calls for a thorough knowledge and practice of desktop applications such as MS Office and iWork. Here we touch upon

I.Find function [Ctrl + F]

II.Track changes

III.Show/Hide

IV.Google search

I.Find function [Ctrl + F]

Consistency and precise grammar are keys to successful publication of a manuscript. Often an editor needs to make repetitive changes throughout a manuscript to achieve consistency, for example, use of “Fig.” vs. “Figure” vs. “fig.” and the use of abbreviations in the text. Therefore, to achieve consistency, use the Ctrl + F function in MS Word.

Read more on the Ctrl + F and Find and Replace functions:

oFor Microsoft 

oFor Mac

II.Track changes

Track Changes is a feature in word processing applications that allows you to see the revisions made to a document. It is usually used for collaborative works, i.e., when more than one person works on one document. This feature is highly beneficial to researchers, writers, and editors. Track Changes gives you the flexibility of accepting and rejecting whatever information you want.

For more information on how to work with tracks, check out the following sites:

oFor Microsoft, for how to use track changes

oFor Mac, for a write up on how to work with tracks in Pages.

III.Show/Hide

Occasionally, new users of Word are alarmed to discover that their previously pristine documents are full of strange symbols—dots, arrows, paragraphs marks, etc. For experienced users, this reaction seems almost comical because experienced users know how invaluable the display of non-printing characters can be both in formatting and troubleshooting documents. Non-printing characters is Word’s term for anything that takes up space or has a formatting function but does not appear on the printed page (e.g., spaces, tabs, paragraph breaks, and the like). Even if you prefer to work most of the time without seeing them, you should know how to display them and what they mean.

This button toggles between display of all non-printing characters and whatever specific non-printing characters you have chosen to display as an alternative. The shortcut key for “Show All” is (Ctrl + Shift + 8). The same key combination will also toggle the display off. So what do all these marks represent?

Line breaks:

Paragraph marks:

Pagination breaks:

Space characters: ∙

Mincho space characters:

Using the Show/Hide button, one can easily remove double spaces and spaces in Mincho font and replace them by spaces in normal font.

For Mac users, please use this link

IV.Google Search

We recommend the use of Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com ) to check usage of technical terms. The search terms must be selected carefully in order to get relevant results.

i.Selecting search terms

The search terms you enter and the order in which you enter them affect both the order and pages that appear in your search results.

Use words likely to appear on the pages you want and avoid using a question as a query.

USE [plant nomenclature Arabidopsis]

NOT [what is the plant nomenclature for all species under Arabidopsis]

Be specific: Use more query terms to narrow your results.

For example, consider the query [animal]. It will result in numerous hits, both relevant and irrelevant. Hence, depending on context, USE [animal studies mouse kidney] or [animal studies mouse “cell line” endostatin] to get document-specific hits.

To search for a phrase, a proper name, or a set of words in a specific order, put them in double quotes.

A query with terms in quotes finds pages containing the exact quoted phrase.

For example, [“Journal of Microbiology”] finds pages containing exactly the phrase “Journal of Microbiology.” The query [Journal of Microbiology] (without quotes) finds pages containing any of “Journal of Microbiology,” “Journal of Clinical Microbiology,” or “Journal of Medical Microbiology.”

A quoted phrase is the most widely used type of special search syntax

o[“we report the case of a young man” ]

o[“strain at break” ]

o[“expanded in a plane wave basis” ]

Use quotes to enter proper names.

o[ “Isaac Newton” ]

o[ “Kruskal–allis”test ]

Google will search for common words (stop words) included in quotes,
 which it would otherwise ignore.

oUSE [ “to recognize the symptoms and diagnose” ]

oNOT [to recognize the symptoms and diagnose]

You may include more than one quoted string in a query. All quoted query phrases must appear on a result page; the implied AND works on both individual words and quoted phrases.

o[“case report”“nee joint”]

Use *, an asterisk character, known as a wildcard, to match one or more words in a phrase (enclosed in quotes).

Each * represents just one or more words. Google treats the * as a placeholder for a word or more than one word. For example, [“e * the case of a child with” ] will give you the different verbs used in this construction.

ii.Advanced operators

Some query words, known as advanced operators, have special meaning to Google. Since the advanced operators are convenient for searching, Google Guide calls them “search operators.”

Here are some examples of search operators.

Note: The colon (:) after the operator name is required.

[link: http://www.doctorswithoutborders.org/]

[allintitle:radiation poisoning]

[Streptococcus pyogenes filetype:pdf]

define:

If you start your query with define: Google shows definitions from pages on the web for the term that follows. This advanced search operator is useful for finding definitions of words, phrases, and acronyms. For example, [define:odontology] will show definitions for “odontology.”

filetype:

If your query is filetype:suffix, Google will restrict the results to pages whose names end in the suffix. For example, [Streptococcus pyogenes hospital filetype:pdf] will return pdf files that match the terms “Streptococcus,” “pyogenes,” and “hospital.”

intitle:

The intitle: operator as in [intitle:spectrum] returns only those results that contain your search term in the document’s title.