Tools Review: PerfectIt Version 3

February 2016

Janet Taylor is a technical writer who has no pretensions at all to being an editor. She is generally happy with her grammar, and her American spelling, but feels her editing skills are sadly lacking. She gets too involved with the story, rather than looking at the words objectively.

To overcome that shortcoming, and because she doesn’t have anyone to edit her work, she relies on software tools to help her. One specific software tool: PerfectIt from Intelligent Editing.

If you already use PerfectIt, you’ll find the new and improved PerfectIt Version 3 well worth considering. The number one reason, for me, is that PerfectIt Version 3 will save me time while making my documents look better than they might be. Anyone who knows me will know that I really appreciate anything that will save me time. Let me tell you about some of the ways it does that.

What does PerfectIt do?

PerfectIt checks for consistency. It will compare all the words in a Microsoft Word file (no Mac version unfortunately) and report inconsistencies ? which make a document look sloppy. From my experience, one of the most common inconsistencies is in the use of hyphens.

As a simple example, if you have both write-up and write up (with and without the hyphen) in your document, PerfectIt will show you where there is an occurrence of each use as shown in Figure 1. Press Fix All and PerfectIt will change all the occurrences to your selected preferred phrase. If you don’t accept the either/or option, you can check each occurrence and decide on the change yourself.

If consistency in word use (and that includes differences in spelling) was all that PerfectIt did, that would be sufficient to make it a winner for me, however, there are many more checks.

For each inconsistency reported, you can, as I’ve mentioned, set a preference and have PerfectIt change them all, or you can check each one. (PerfectIt tells you how many occurrences there are of each.) You simply select an occurrence from the list in the location to check window and you will be taken to the area of your document where it occurs. Change it or leave it alone ? it’s your choice. In Figure 1 you can see the options available and a helpful tip. This has to be one of the easiest to use dialogs I’ve ever encountered.

In my case, I don’t write most of our documents and sometimes they are quite large (100 pages or so, with very little turnaround time), so I don’t always get to read them either. When PerfectIt finds a potential error, I often find other errors in the vicinity, so I can fix them at the same time. There are many other checks that are done and one I appreciate is being able to have a check for heading case used in one level of heading and sentence case in the others. Another is checking for heading or sentence case in table headings. I have many mixtures of those because my authors have copied tables from other documents. Also checked are table and graphic identifiers. If you use one of these in one place, PerfectIt checks all the other tables and graphics. The list goes on. Take a look at them on the Intelligent Editing web site.

Bypassing specific text by Word style

Until now, I’ve not taken an interest in any options, the install-and-go version has been fine for me to use but there is one change that I wanted to see: bypass text with a specific Word style. Our text contains a large number of programming code examples and when I first got PerfectIt I’d found it frustrating that these were checked for consistency also. So I did the workaround suggested: turned the program code style into hidden text. PerfectIt ignores hidden text but it wasn’t an ideal arrangement.

I’m not quite sure when the fix happened but PerfectIt V3 now has recorded my Program Code as a style to bypass. Brilliant!

Number checking

You can have PerfectIt convert numerals in sentences into a spelled-out number. You can choose the range 1 to 9 or 1-10 or greater, it’s up to you. As well as the conversion of numbers to actual words, PerfectIt goes one further and allows you to specify that if the number is preceded by, say, Table, Figure, Appendix (that’s just some from a very long list) then it is left as a numeral.

Abbreviations

PerfectIt checks if the first occurrence of an abbreviation is accompanied by a definition, either in brackets or before or after it. For written work, this is the standard but for online pages, every page is page one (as Mark Baker says) and so I appreciate PerfectIt showing me everywhere the abbreviation is used. At the end of a checking process, PerfectIt offers an option to list all abbreviations found in the document together with their definitions. That’s perfect from my point of view, as I can create the list as a glossary and know that it’s complete. Another major time saver, as I used to build this list as I went along ? missing more than one, I’m sure.

Another small time saver

One of the problems I used to have was that I’d ask PerfectIt to change all the occurrences of an inconsistency and then it would stop and wait for me to press the Next button before continuing. I’d frequently forget to do this and sit and wait for the next error to be reported ? until I realised that nothing was happening. Now, optionally, you can tell PerfectIt V3 to simply continue immediately to the next check after you've taken your preferred action. Perfect!

Instead of using this option, you can use a PerfectIt keyboard shortcut. This might be safer than setting it as a default. See PerfectIt’s documentation for a list of these shortcut keys.

List checking

Before PerfectIt V3, your bulleted or numbered lists were checked for consistency. Is the first character of the list a capital? Is there a full stop at the end of each line? Now, instead of checking the inconsistencies (if there are any) and reporting them for you to decide what to do, you can specify in PerfectIt Options how you want your lists defined: capitals on all lists? or just capitals on single words? full stops at the end of every line? and so on. You set the options that you want to use and then PerfectIt will simply fix them. That is truly a time saver!

Saving your PerfectIt options

After you have made or changed your selections, you can save them in a 'style sheet'. I was a bit mystified by the name ‘style sheet’ at first because what I was selecting was options. Well, PerfectIt’s style sheet contains the options you have selected. You simply Export and save it and then you can use it on any number of other PCs. Perfect for standards within an organisation.

I recommend that you watch the YouTube videos showing you how to set many of the options. One such video is at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=riqug_3k14A

‘Reports’ available

At the end of a checking run, you’re offered a series of reports which provide summaries of various aspects of the document. I’ve mentioned the one I use: the list of abbreviations, but another one I’m certainly going to save for certain authors (the ones that don’t want me to change a single word) is a list of all the changes that have been made with PerfectIt. I can’t wait to make use of that!

Find and Replace

There is also a Find and Replace feature with wildcards that operate in the same way as Word’s Find and Replace. So why include this Find and Replace when you can use the Word version? According to Daniel Hueman, the thoughtful genius behind PerfectIt, you can set more than one Find and Replace to run one after the other. I couldn’t imagine using this feature until just recently when we had some product name changes. Now the product’s guide names in cross references between my guides also need to be changed. I haven’t tackled that job yet.

My first trial run with PerfectIt Version 3 was a perfect test, in my opinion. I had to combine five files written by different people in different eras and all describing the use of different versions of Windows products. The combined file was 489 pages. The PerfectIt check found so many inconsistencies, it took me over two hours to go through them. I certainly learnt quite a bit about the PerfectIt Options during that process! I’ve since been congratulated for doing a very good job of this merge. I took the credit but it was really PerfectIt that deserved it.

If you have been using PerfectIt as I have, then I recommend you upgrade to Version 3. If you’ve not used PerfectIt at all, why not download a trial version to see how your documents stand up to scrutiny?

Disclaimer: Intelligent Editing provided a free copy of PerfectIt 3 for review.

Reproduced with permission from TWIA's Context (16-17), December 2015.