The murderer of our managing director, Hermione McDougall, was revealed as our very own social media consultant, Cate Springer.

Cate's dastardly deed was uncovered by Rhonda Baker, a proofreader in our legal department.

Our annual company outing is on Sunday 18 July. This year's outing will take the form of a murder mystery.

Over 20 staff and guests will be out and about in Perth and area looking for clues and solving them. If you see anyone with a deerstalker and magnifying glass then you'll know who they work for.

The denouement will take place towards the end of the afternoon and be followed by food and refreshments.

We have ordered our first Quad-Core 27-inch iMacs.

These are for our design and typesetting team. Amazing processors. Loads of main memory. Some of us can hardly wait.

Finding InDesign CS5 slow when using features such as Span Columns and Balance Columns?

Go to InDesign | Preferences | Interface and under Options set Live Drawing to Delayed or Never. 

Delayed is the same as CS4. Never will probably make things a bit faster. But Immediate might make ID run slowly on Macs older than a year or two. It is set on by default. This fix should bring about radical performance improvement.

From the help manual:

Live Screen Drawing Select an option to determine whether the image redraws as you drag an object. If Immediate is selected, the image redraws while you drag. If Never is selected, dragging an image moves only the frame, and then image is moved when you release the mouse button. If Delayed is selected, the image redraws only if you pause before dragging. Delayed offers the same behavior as in InDesign CS4.

Good news on the promotion front: one of our production editors, Petra Abbam, will become a senior production editor on 1 August.

Petra has been with us for 2 years and is a graduate in Computer Science and French.

We often provide regular clients with editing tips and tricks, and some clients have even incorporated these and other suggestions into their internal work processes.

As an example, try the following wildcard find and replace in Microsoft Word. It will find every hyphen between digits (e.g. as used in page ranges in reference lists) and replace them with proper en dashes.

Open a test document that you know contains hyphens between digits.

From Word's Edit menu select Replace. Tick the option titled Use Wildcards.

– In Find what, enter this: ([0-9])(-)([0-9])

– In Replace with, enter this: \1^=\3

– Now select Replace All.

Used appropriately, the above find and replace can save a great deal of time during editing.

We know a great number of such tips for Microsoft Word, many of which are part of a suite of custom-written macros and toolbars that we use for cleaning-up authors' files or for on-screen editing.

If the above tip captures your interest, and you have a suitable project that would benefit from this kind of intervention, then please contact us.