Video transcript
Welcome to PerfectIt, the leading software for proofreading and editing books, contracts, reports, proposals, academic work and other professional documents.
PerfectIt locates difficult-to-find errors such as consistency mistakes and style issues. To start PerfectIt, add it from the Office Store.
PerfectIt works with Office 365 on Mac, PC, iPad or Word Online. This is the PC version, but no matter which you’re using, you just load it from MS Word.
Click Start to run and PerfectIt scans your document.
The first check it runs is hyphenation. Where it finds a possible inconsistency it gives you the choice.
Here it finds cooperation with and without a hyphen.
Every decision is left to the user. You choose the version you prefer… so let’s choose cooperation without a hyphen. Then all possible locations to fix are shown below.
Check each location, look at the context carefully, and click Fix for any items you want to change. If you change your mind, click Undo. Now we’ve made hyphenation consistent, let’s click Next to move to the next check.
Here the word organize takes an S in some locations, but a Z in others. Depending on what country you’re in, both spellings might be allowed. But they don’t normally belong in the same document.
If we prefer the version with the S, we click that. Then below are all the locations to fix.
If we prefer the version with the Z, we click that, then we fix these ones instead.
Still, we always check the context. English has lots of exceptions and there might be a direct quote or other reason for the inconsistency.
Let’s click Next again. PerfectIt looks for abbreviations and their definitions, and it finds if the abbreviation is used before a definition, if it’s defined twice and lots of other issues. This one is PerfectIt’s check for abbreviations that haven’t been defined.
To correct this, we can move to the document and back to PerfectIt to make changes as we go. I click the location. Then switch over to make the changes in Word. I fill in the definition. Then click back to PerfectIt for the next location. When we’re done, click Next.
Here’s PerfectIt’s check for Phrases in Capitals. In this document, it finds the word Government with a capital and with a lowercase G. What you can see is that errors that might take hours to find, are corrected in seconds. And there’s so much more. You can use PerfectIt to generate a table of abbreviations. And if we go back to the beginning, you can see all of the checks available. We can use PerfectIt to check:
The time saving from all of those checks combined is incredible. Instead of reading through a document twice, you can just read once.
And it isn’t just consistency. You can also use PerfectIt to check a specific style. Instead of looking for consistency, choose the style manual you want to enforce. Available styles include United Nations, European Union or American Legal Style as well as spelling preferences for the UK, US, Canada and Australia. Features to customize PerfectIt for your house style are available in the PC version and we plan to add that to all other versions in the future too.
PerfectIt is free to try from the Office Store. So start correcting your text and start saving time today.