Can a new technology, system, or process save us time and make work suck less?
If there’s one big, hairy question that has driven my career, that might be it. (Not surprisingly, that same simple query has also irritated a slew of hidebound colleagues and clients over the years, but I’ll save that post for another day.)
I’ve written before about how all folks in the publishing world should noodle with AI. Thanks to ChatGPT and its ilk, we are now able to automate once time-intensive, manual processes. And by we, I’m including authors, editors, publishers, and ghostwriters.
In today’s post, I’ll describe how less than half an hour of messing around will pay dividends on all future writing projects.
Scenario
In 1997, I started teaching myself the rudiments of Visual Basic for Applications. If you’ve ever written a macro in Microsoft Word, Excel, or Access, you’ve used VBA. Today, though, my VBA skills aren’t what they once were. I spend far more time playing with Python.
In an age of AI and powerful low-code/no-code tools, why not play around?
I still do all of my ghostwriting and long-form writing in Microsoft Word, but I outline books and take notes in RacketHub/Notion. The latter uses Markdown. As a result, when users paste content into Microsoft Word, styles tend to translate well. Still, occasionally superfluous ones in my admittedly intricate Word template.
Ain’t no thang, right?
Wrong. It’s essential to keep a manuscript clean AF.
In the past, I’ve bulk-selected new and existing styles to change or remove them. (Yes, you can do that.) The whole process took maybe ten minutes per book chapter, depending on a few variables that aren’t worth explaining here. It wasn’t terribly painful, but I knew that I could automate it.
Where to begin?
Enter Claude
Not that long ago, solving similar problems meant running a few traditional Google searches and poking around on Stack Overflow. If that didn’t bear fruit, maybe I’d post on Reddit. In an age of AI and powerful low-code/no-code tools, though, why not play around?
I prompted Claude to generate VBA as follows:
Here’s its output:
I tried it on my test Word document it worked perfectly. What’s more, Claude’s simple comments explain exactly what each for-loop in the code is doing. I then tweaked the VBA to accommodate more mass substitutions for my new macro.
Maybe Andrej Karpathy is right.
A Word of Caution
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the elephant in the virtual room: Running third-party code on your computer can cause massive problems. VBA is no exception to this rule. For this very reason, Microsoft has allowed IT departments to disable VBA throughout their organizations for decades. Fortunately, I remembered enough VBA from back in the day to realize that Claude’s output wouldn’t wreak havoc on my operating system or hardware or unleash a zombie.
What You Need to Know
Wasting a few hours here and there reformatting text and styles won’t derail your book project. You’ll live. Still, why not look for simple, powerful, and inexpensive ways to minimize grunt work? Why not instead focus on writing and the good stuff?
While we’re asking profound questions, here’s another: Is your existing book coach, ghostwriter, or publisher bringing similar ideas and time-savers to you? If they’re stuck in the 1990s, then consider switching.
One More Thing
I’ll be announcing the fifth Racket title soon. Stay tuned.
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