Book review

Total Word Domination, by Jack M. Lyons

Pocket PC Press, 2001. Order from Amazon.com (Microsoft Reader format) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005R1ZO/ref=nosim/weberwomanswreve

Reviewed by Jean Hollis Weber

Jack M. Lyons, the perpetrator of The Editorium (a website that provides Microsoft Word add-in programs for editors, writers, typesetters, and other publishing professionals, and a newsletter of tips for using Word) has compiled the first year's worth of his newsletters into an e-book.

The author says the book is "designed to give readers a table of contents and a more enjoyable reading experience than they'd get in an e-mail (text only) format."

The topics covered in Total Word Domination are almost all different from the topics covered in my book Taming Microsoft Word, so the two complement each other nicely (and inexpensively). Here are just a few of the topics covered:

• Good typefaces to use when editing onscreen
• Basic "conditional text" using styles
• Clever uses for "Find and Replace" using wildcards
• Explanations of templates and styles
• Where to get free templates for Word
• Searching with numeric character codes and Microsoft's built-in codes
• More uses for hidden text
• Using the spike
• Style aliases
• Commands to jump from to the next or previous sentence

Each topic explains not only how to do something, but why or when an editor might want to use the feature.

Several topics involve macros, some of which are given in the book. Others are part of the programs the author sells, and after reading the descriptions of their usefulness, I'm keen to buy them and try them out.

Some of the web addresses mentioned in the book suffer from unfortunate line breaks which could have been avoided with some careful editing, but you can easily figure out what they should be.

I enjoyed reading Total Word Domination and learned several new tricks to add to my repertoire.

The book is currently available only for Microsoft Reader, but the author says he has plans to provide it in PDF as well. You can buy the Reader version from Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005R1ZO/ref=nosim/weberwomanswreve

You can visit The Editorium at http://www.editorium.com/.

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