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Social Media: A new feature in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers lets you select bits of text that aren’t next to each other so that you can, for example, format them or copy them all at once.

The post Select Non-Contiguous Text in Pages, Keynote, and Numbers 14 first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

In this article, we’re going to recommend general ways of working with change tracking and comments, rather than exploring the particular interfaces in different apps. This advice should work well for all apps that support change tracking and comments.

Establish a Working Approach

There are two typical scenarios when working with others on a document. Either you’re collaborating with colleagues to create the best possible final document, or you’re negotiating over every change, as might be the case when constructing a legal agreement where people have conflicting goals and agendas. We’ll focus on the former since everything gets tense when multiple people have to sign off on every change. If you end up in an editing scenario that’s essentially an arms-length negotiation, you’ll probably make fewer changes and examine each one closely.

Assign Roles

Talk with your fellow collaborators to clarify who will be doing what. Depending on your workflow, a document will have people in two or three roles:

• Author: The author drafts the document without change tracking enabled. Subsequently, the author accepts changes made by the editor and contributors.
• Editor: The editor enhances the author’s text with change tracking enabled and accepts the author’s subsequent changes. (An editor isn’t necessary as long as everyone else doesn’t mind the author accepting their own changes later.)
• Contributor: Everyone else is a contributor, and they only make changes in change tracking mode. They neither accept nor reject changes.

These roles make it clear who can and should do what. Otherwise, you end up in a situation where people are hesitant to accept changes or where someone accepts changes before the author has seen them.

Even with these roles, the order in which the document gets reviewed can matter if you want certain contributors to see what’s changed, even if they don’t accept the changes. Generally speaking, people take turns with documents, with communication via email or some other channel to let others know when they can dive in.

Some documents may need only one editing pass, whereas others will require several. You’ll know you’re done when all changes have been accepted and comments have been resolved.

Decide Which Changes to Show

When you enable change tracking, every change will be tracked. That can be counterproductive if the number of changes becomes overwhelming—to either people or the software. You may wish to make certain changes without change tracking enabled or accept them before the next person’s turn. For instance:

• Formatting changes: If you’re changing styles or putting text into lists to make a draft more presentable or professional, those changes can quickly clutter the document and are usually not controversial.
• Consistency changes: For ensuring consistent usage, such as one space after a period, a search-and-replace with change tracking disabled lets the next person avoid dealing with hundreds of small changes. You can leave a comment at the top of the document noting what you did.
• Minor proofreading changes: Everyone makes typos. You may wish to keep typo fixes visible to show how much your editing has improved the document, or you can accept them right away to save the next person time.
• Too many changes to parse: At times, you may edit a paragraph so heavily that it has been almost entirely rewritten. As with proofreading changes, you might want to keep those changes visible to indicate how much you’ve done, or you might want to accept them all and leave a comment saying, “Read this paragraph carefully—too many changes to show with change tracking.”

Accept (Don’t Reject) Changes

When it comes time to review changes, apps let you either accept or reject changes. We usually recommend accepting changes even if you disagree with them. That’s not to say you have to stick with a proposed change that you dislike, but the person who made it did so for a reason, and it’s up to you to figure out what that reason is and recast the text to accommodate it, preferably with an explanatory comment. That way, they’ll see your change on their next pass and can decide if you addressed their concern.

Occasionally, someone might negatively change some carefully worded text because they didn’t realize why it was worded that way. Rather than rejecting such a change, leave it and start a discussion. In all likelihood, they’ll withdraw the change on the next pass, or you can reject it once they see where you’re coming from.

When accepting changes, you can employ several techniques:

• Few changes: If there aren’t that many changes, it’s easy to accept them one at a time. As you do this, watch for mistakes that creep in—missing or double spaces, verb tense and number mismatches, and so on. These can be easy to introduce and difficult to see while editing.
• Many changes: When the entire document seems to have changed color because there are so many changes, it’s easier in most apps (other than Google Docs) to select a paragraph at a time, accept all changes in the selection, and then read it closely to make sure the changes are both helpful and don’t introduce additional mistakes. A keyboard shortcut to an Accept Selected Changes command can make this process faster.
  

We don’t recommend using the Accept All feature to accept all the changes in the document unless it’s quite short and you plan to read the entire thing carefully again.

Dealing with Comments

Finally, some comments about comments. In most apps, you can add a comment to a change and start a threaded discussion about the change. That’s extremely helpful if you want to explain why you made the change. However, that approach works poorly if the next person wants to accept your change and continue chatting in the comment, since accepting the change will close the comment thread. As such, we recommend restricting change-specific comments to non-controversial situations where you’re merely informing the next person about why you made ​the change.

When you need to ask a question or raise a topic for discussion, do that in a standalone comment instead, so the discussion doesn’t disappear with the accepted change. Even in this situation, however, you have to be careful. If you select a particular word and start a discussion asking if it’s the right word to use, the next person may not be able to change that word without deleting the comment thread. One solution is to select a few words before the text on which you’re commenting, or just the period ending the sentence, so changes can be made while retaining the comment. Another approach is to select more text—the entire sentence or paragraph that contains the text in question—for the comment. That’s more effective, but too many such comments will overwhelm the document with large colored comment blocks.

Who should resolve comment threads? Although some comments are purely informational and can be resolved by the person to whom they’re addressed, it’s usually best if the person who started the comment thread resolves it. Let’s say the editor leaves a comment that asks a question. The author responds, so the editor needs to see that response. If it doesn’t fully answer the initial question, the editor can ask for more information, and the author can provide it. The editor can then resolve the comment to indicate that the final comment from the author closed the topic.

One last point. Comment threads within a document are useful but limited. If a topic needs significant discussion, break it out to email, Slack, or even a meeting rather than going back and forth within a single comment at length.

We hope this advice makes your collaborative editing faster, easier, and more companionable—remember, the goal should always be to improve the document. However, there’s room for tweaking within these general guidelines to create the ideal workflow for your group.

(Featured image by iStock.com/FrankieMea)

The post How to Use Change Tracking Effectively When Collaborating on Documents first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

• An extra space can cause an awkward jump from one word to the next, or it could push punctuation away from the final word in a clause or sentence. And yes, current convention among professional publishers and typographers calls for one space after a period, not two.
• The wrong number of tabs might not be obvious until you add or remove text from the line, at which point having too many or too few tabs will suddenly mess up the formatting.
• An extra return causes a line break, something that you might overlook if the return falls naturally where the line would break on its own, but as you add or remove text, the line break could become embarrassing.

These and similar errors are easy to make or to encounter in copied and pasted text. They’re equally easy to fix, but only if you know why they’re happening. To help you identify them, most Mac word processors, page layout programs, and text editors have a command or option called something like “Show Invisibles.”

As you would expect from the name, Show Invisibles replaces previously invisible characters with something you can see. Spaces are generally replaced with a vertically centered dot, tabs with some sort of right-pointing arrow, and returns with something that’s formally known as a pilcrow but more commonly called a paragraph mark. Here’s what they look like in Pages.

Revealing invisible characters is tremendously helpful, but it can also clutter up the display and make text harder to read. So every app that lets you show invisibles also makes it easy to hide them again so you can focus on your text.

Note that even if you can see invisible characters on the screen, they will not show in a printout of the document.

Precisely where you find the Show Invisibles command—and what it’s called—varies from app to app. Here’s where to look in some popular Mac word processing, page layout, and text editing apps:

• Pages: In Apple’s Pages, you can reveal invisible characters by choosing View > Show Invisibles. To hide them, choose View > Hide Invisibles—the command changes based on whether or not they’re showing.
• Microsoft Word: In Microsoft’s near-ubiquitous word processor, the primary way you show and hide invisibles is by clicking the ¶ button in the Home toolbar. Click it once to show and again to hide. However, if you always want certain invisible characters to appear, you can select them individually in Word > Preferences > View > Show Non-Printing Characters.
  
  
• Nisus Writer Pro: In this highly capable, long-standing alternative to Microsoft Word, choose View > Show Invisibles. When selected, it gains a checkmark. Choose it again to conceal the characters and remove the checkmark.
• Scrivener: In this word processor aimed at long-form writing and screenwriting, choose View > Text Editing > Show Invisibles. Choose it again to hide them.
• Adobe InDesign: In Adobe’s market-leading page-layout app, choose Type > Show Hidden Characters. The command changes when selected. Hide them again by choosing Type > Hide Hidden Characters.
• Affinity Publisher: In this inexpensive but surprisingly full-featured competitor to InDesign, the command you’re looking for is Text > Show Special Characters. When you choose this command, it gains a checkmark. Choose it again to hide invisible characters and remove the checkmark.
• BBEdit: This text-editing powerhouse aimed at developers, bloggers, and Web designers lets you show tabs and returns, spaces, or both. Either choose the Show Invisibles and Show Spaces commands in View > Text Display or click the tiny gear icon in the upper left of the window and select the appropriate checkboxes.
  

Not all text-focused apps offer a way of displaying these invisible characters. For instance, we know of no way of doing this in Apple’s TextEdit. Nor is it possible in the online word processor Google Docs, although you can achieve a similar effect temporarily by choosing Edit > Find and Replace, selecting Match Using Regular Expressions, and then searching (one at a time) for a space, for t for tabs, and for n for returns.

Even if you’re using an app not mentioned above, our descriptions of their approaches should give a sense of what to look for in the interface or the app’s documentation. Enjoy your newfound ability to see beyond the visible!

(Featured image by Aleksandar Pasaric from Pexels)

The post Make Better Documents and Edit More Easily with Show Invisibles first appeared on MacTech Solutions.

Sixth-generation iPad

For the most part, the new sixth-generation iPad is the same as the fifth-generation model it replaces. Its physical dimensions are unchanged, so existing cases and accessories should continue to work. It comes in the same three colors: silver, gold, and space gray. Even the pricing and options remain the same, with a 32 GB model starting at $329—the jump to 128 GB adds $100, and cellular capabilities add $130.

What sets the sixth-generation iPad apart from its predecessor is its support for the Apple Pencil stylus, which was previously restricted to the iPad Pro line, which started at $649. Thanks to a high-resolution touch sensor in the iPad’s Retina screen and palm-rejection technology, you can now use the $99 Apple Pencil in compatible apps. As with the iPad Pro, the Apple Pencil is sensitive to pressure and tilt so you can vary line weight and shading, much as with a traditional pencil.

Also new in the sixth-generation iPad is Apple’s A10 Fusion chip, with its embedded M10 coprocessor. The company claims that the new processors provide up to 40-percent faster CPU and 50-percent faster graphics performance.

The extra performance may also be related to the iPad’s new camera capabilities. Unlike the previous iPad, the sixth-generation iPad can take Live Photos and supports body detection in images along with the previously supported face detection. Also new is support for the Retina Flash feature that turns the screen into a giant flash when taking selfies.

iWork with Apple Pencil Support

If you haven’t been using Pages, Numbers, and Keynote on the iPad, the latest updates may encourage you to try Apple’s iWork apps—remember, they’re available for free in the App Store. Notably, the three apps allow you to draw, sketch, and write directly within documents. Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s Smart Annotations feature, currently in beta. With it, your comments and proofing marks anchor dynamically to text, and stay with the text they were attached to even as the document changes.

Smart Annotations are particularly welcome for those who take advantage of the real-time collaboration features built into the iWork apps. This was an education event, and it’s clear that Apple is building tools that will allow teachers to mark up and comment on student documents. But the same capabilities are equally as useful in the business world. For business users, Apple also announced that the real-time collaboration features in the iWork apps now work on documents stored in the Box file sharing service. Previously they were available only for documents stored in iCloud, which has little adoption in the enterprise.

Finally, the iPad version of Pages gains features that help users create ebooks in EPUB format. And Apple added a new Presenter mode to Pages, which lets you turn your iPhone or iPad into a teleprompter for distraction-free reading.

In the end, if you’re interested in using the Apple Pencil, the combination of the sixth-generation iPad and the updated iWork apps will let you do more for over $300 less than before.

The post Apple Introduces New iPad with Apple Pencil Support, Updates iWork first appeared on MacTech Solutions.