Spike

Remember when editors wore green celluloid visors and impaled pieces of paper on a shiny steel spike? Word, too, has a spike, but it’s buried so deep that most Word users have never even heard of it. I’ve brought it up to the surface. The spike is a cumulative cut and paste. It lets you cut as many blocks of text as you like and then paste them all at once in your chosen location. The text is pasted in the order in which it was cut—first in, first out. If you’re rearranging massive chunks of text, you’ll like spike.

Note: Word’s spike feature has a bug: it pastes marked revisions as regular text, which means the text you’ve deleted comes back again along with the text you’ve added—just a mess. Editor’s ToolKit overcomes this problem by making permanent any revisions in the spiked text before it is pasted. Just so you know.

Access:

• Ctrl + F5 to spike

• Ctrl + F6 to paste the spike

• Edit menu, Spike

• Edit menu, Unspike

• Editor’s ToolKit 1 toolbar