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Easy Way to Change Reviewer Names in a Marked-up Microsoft Word Document

A volunteer role I really enjoy is serving as a co-editor for a peer reviewed journal related to my faith, Interpreter: A Journal of Latter-day Saint Faith and Scholarship. One of the challenges involves the use of marked-up Word documents from reviewers. I’d like to share those document with the authors, but many times the reviewer’s Microsoft Word program is set up such that their name is shown for every inserted comment or every edit made. Under our double blind review system means I must not let authors know the names of the reviewers and vice versa.

For a while I solved this problem by running a VBA macro that changed the comments to just show “Reviewer X” as the author, but I failed to get a macro to change the names shown for edits, so I would have to go an manually undo and redo the edits to make them appear to be mine. Tedious sometimes.

Fortunately, I found an easy way to change the names associated with both edits and comments. The trick is to save the Word document as an XML file. Then the document can be opened with a text editor such as BBEdit (my favorite on the Mac) and one can make global changes to replace the reviewer’s name. For example, if I were the reviewer, you will see data such as :author=”Jeff Lindsay” and <dc:creator>Jeff Lindsay. A global change, searching for :author=” and <dc:creator> can then let you find and convert all of these to something anonymous like “Reviewer X.” Also wish to search for the reviewer’s initials that would follow w:initials=. Further, sometimes there is an ID field that may contain reviewer informat such as email address. Search for :userId=”. After making changes, save the file and open it with Word to confirm all traces of the reviewer’s identity are gone. Be sure to check the list of reviewers in the Review tab; for me, they appear via a dropdown menu when I click on the “Show markup” button. Then save the document again as a DOCX file or whatever format you were using.

There’s another route that involves renaming a Word file as a ZIP file and then unzipping it to get a collection of editable XML files, but I think the way I described is easier.

By Jeffrey Lindsay|2021-01-23T13:57:51-07:00January 11th, 2021|Categories: Business, Webmasters|Tags: Microsoft Word tips|Comments Off

Slow Internet Connection in China? Tips for Service and How to Measure Local Speed

The most challenging aspect of life in China for many foreigners may be the Internet. In addition to many of our favorite sites being blocked by the Great Firewall of China, the Internet here can often be painfully slow. Here are some tips for dealing with both problems.

The Firewall can be overcome with VPN, allowing a direct port to a foreign server to be established with encrypted communication. I use ExpressVPN (https://www.expressvpn.mobi/). It costs money, but it’s worth it and I believe it to be the best service with the best technical support to help you deal with the challenges of connecting. It also adds some extra security since data to and from your computer is encrypted, so it’s good to use for online banking and other sensitive issues. It slows everything down, though.

The general problem of a slow Internet connection in China may be due in part to the heavy work of monitoring Internet usage and to rapidly expanding demand on existing infrastructure. There’s a lot of data requiring a lot of surveillance. But many times foreigners living in China don’t realize that the service they are getting in their apartment can be upgraded to faster service. The base local speed (China to China connections) may range from 10 Mps (10 megabytes/sec) to 100 Mps. If you need higher speed, contact your provider (often China Telecom, reachable by dialing 10000–and yes, they do have English speaking support) and check into an upgrade.

Understand your connection speed by doing speed tests. A good test that might not load for you in China (sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t) is SpeedTest.net. This service can use servers in China to test your latency (ping delay), download speed, and upload speed. If your download speed is limited to around 10 Mps, using the Internet is going to be painful. Upgrade. In Shanghai, you can use a China Telecom service at https://sh.189.cn/support/netreport/ to test you download speed with local servers to see what your maximum speed is likely to be. It’s in Chinese, but you don’t need to understand Chinese to use it. Click on the green button that says “å¼€å§‹æµ‹é€Ÿ” (begin testing speed). The numerical result is in Mps. You can also use other speed tests that measure data transfer involving US servers. Numbers will be lower than using Asian servers, of course. ATT has a speed test and so does Comcast (Xfinity).

For best speed, make sure you have background processes off (things like software updates, online backup, etc. can slow you down) and don’t have too many browser windows open. For best speed, bypass the slight delay of a wireless router and plug directly into the Ethernet output jack on the back of your cable modem or router — but the gains will often be minor. Also beware of prime times when everybody else is trying to download movies or play games: the Internet can really bog down in China from about 7 PM to 11 PM. And weekends, lunchtime, and so on.