I am very excited to announce a new addition to the arsenal of professional translators, editors, copyeditors and DTP specialists: TransTools+ ...

As translators, we deal with written text all the time. In the digital world, text is represented using the Unicode standard which encodes the individual graphemes of all written languages and can be considered the Bible for anyone dealing with electronic text. And since the job of the translator is to transpose text from one language to another, we must use the proper Unicode symbols to do that. In this article, you will learn how to identify any Unicode symbol that you encounter in electronic documents in order to decide whether it should be retained, removed or replaced in the translation...

Using the keyboard instead of the mouse is one of very effective ways to increase productivity. This article explains how to assign a key combination to a standard Microsoft Word command or a custom Word macro...

If you want to find text in Microsoft Word, you may be tempted to click Find button in Word ribbon, or press Ctrl+F. This opens the Navigation Pane which is not convenient for finding text. Instead, I recommend you to use Find & Replace dialogue...

Translating Excel spreadsheets is pretty easy. All you need to do is translate text in individual cells and then format the spreadsheet for the target language user. However, sometimes your spreadsheet will contain charts, making translation more complicated. This article will help you understand and master charts so you can easily translate even the most advanced varieties...

Hidden text is a special formatting feature of Microsoft Word which allows to hide some text from the user. In translation settings, this feature is very useful because it allows to hide text from CAT tools or convert it to non-translatable tags. This article explains how to change Word view settings to hide or show hidden text...

When you copy words and phrases inside the same Word document or from other applications, most often the text is pasted with its formatting. This formatting may be different from the formatting of the surrounding text, so the pasted text will contrast with the text around it. To avoid this, you need to paste text without formatting. Here is how to do this...

If you need to run complex find and replace operations using Word's Find & Replace dialogue, you need to clear the parameters before the next operation. Here is how to do this...

Sometimes, especially in Word documents that were produced by converting PDFs, rows do not expand to fit the text as it expands during translation, or, if the text shrinks after translation, they remain too tall for the text...