Video transcript

In this video series, we’re going to look at how you can build a PerfectIt style sheet that will help enforce your house style. You can build a different style sheet for every style that you work with. And you can share the styles with colleagues so that everyone in your organization can benefit from them.

But first off: if you’ve never used PerfectIt before, you don’t need to watch any of these videos to start improving your documents. More than 80% of PerfectIt’s checking doesn’t require any customization. These tutorials are just for people who want to go that extra step and build a style guide.

So just quickly for those that haven’t used PerfectIt’s checking before, here’s how easy it is to get started. Click to launch PerfectIt. Then click PerfectIt’s big ‘Start’ button. PerfectIt guides you through potential errors, and you don’t need anything else. For example, here it’s found an inconsistency.

So now, for those of you who do want to use PerfectIt to check your specific house style and want to customize it, let’s start with something simple - what is a style sheet? PerfectIt comes with a set of built-in style sheets, and you can see the selection here. Let’s choose ‘US Spelling’.

Each style sheet consists of hundreds or even thousands of preferences. So you can use a style sheet to enforce a house style. For example, these are the preferences built into the US spelling style sheet. 

But the great thing about style sheets is that you can build your own. For example, let’s add a new style. Click ‘Manage Styles’, then ‘New’, then name the style. In this case, let’s call it ‘New House Style’. If we edit that, we can see that it’s a new style with no preferences built in.

But rather than starting from scratch, a great way to get started with your own style is to make use of an existing one. This time, let’s do a new style based on US spelling. To do that, click ‘Export’. Then save the file anywhere on your hard disk. Now click ‘Import’. Find the file we exported. Then give the new one a name. Let’s call it ‘US House Style’.

Now let’s look at that new style. As you can see, we have a new style with hundreds of preferences already programmed in. 

That style is ready to use. However, in the rest of this tutorial, we’ll show you a few easy steps to improve the power of this new style sheet and enhance the checking of your house style.