DAY 2: Elizabeth Blalock posts on workshops

If you weren't at the ISMTE meeting in Baltimore, here's a sample of what you missed at August 5's Excel and Copyediting workshops:

Tom McLung showed us how to use conditional formatting and filters to identify data of interest in an excel file. VLookup lets you relate elements in one table to those in another (i.e., do you spend lots of time hand-assigning countries to regions for your reporting? VLookup can automate this task for you!). Pivot tables allow you to look at your data in flexible combinations, and, once created, can be used as a shell with which to process updated data. Mastering these and other excel features will streamline your reporting tasks no matter your peer review system.

Deborah Bowman of the American Society for Gastrointestinal Endoscopy talked about the importance of creating a journal-specific style guide appropriate for your readers and their specialty. A general style guide will give the basics, but your journal-specific style guide can address issues you and your editor find particularly annoying (how about "firstly" and "lastly"?), as well as common errors you find when proofing articles. By noting these as you go along, you will, after several months, have a style guide. Deborah suggests sending important changes to your copyeditors immediately as a "tip of the day", while minor changes should be compiled and the updated guide sent once or twice a year.

There's still time to register for the UK meeting in Oxford on August 25 -- don't miss out![link for registration: http://www.ismte.org/conferences2009.html]