March 2020 Newsletter

Business continuity during COVID-19, customer news, and more in our March newsletter!

Business continuity & COVID-19

We understand that this is a time of concern. We want to reassure our customers, partners, and colleagues around the world that we are implementing business continuity measures focused on keeping our team safe and all of you in operation. You’ll find all the details in this announcement; please watch our social media and your inbox for updates as the situation evolves.

Bruce Rosenblum, NISO Fellow

At the NISO Plus conference on February 25, Bruce Rosenblum was awarded the title of NISO Fellow, in recognition of his tireless service and valuable contributions to NISO. We couldn’t be prouder!

Bruce served on NISO’s Board of Directors from 2005 through 2013, and he has been a member and/or chair of several NISO working groups and standing committees over the years, including those for JATS, BITS, and NISO STS. If you’ve ever worked with or used content published in JATS, BITS, or STS XML, deposited content with Crossref, or used a DOI to find a piece of content, you’ve benefited from Bruce’s work with NISO.

You can read Bruce’s acceptance speech on our blog; for more details on the intertwined histories of NISO, JATS, and Bruce, check out this 2017 NISO Newsline interview!

#eXtyles20th: Q&A with eXtyles customer GPO

As part of our #eXtyles20th celebrations, we’re sitting down with a variety of eXtyles customers to chat about their experiences! Our first Q&A is with Jim Bender at the US Government Publishing Office, whose team started using eXtyles SI (our server implementation of eXtyles) for the US Federal Register in 2008.

You’ll find the whole conversation on the Inera blog!

Welcome to Medford!

Last week Inera moved to a new location, and we’re stoked! We said goodbye to our Belmont home, and we’ve now settled in to our new office in Medford (and transitioned to working at home for the time being).

Our new mailing address is 101 Station Landing, Suite 300, Medford, MA 02155. Email addresses and phone numbers remain the same.

Standards news: #NISOPlus20

A lot happened at the inaugural NISO Plus conference! We’d like to thank Robin Dunford, who represented Inera at the meeting and on the Ask the Experts panel, for the following highlights:

  • NISO Plus was very well attended for the inaugural conference in a series; clearly there’s a need for a place where information providers and technologists can meet. Next year’s conference will be held in a bigger venue.
  • Metadata was a theme of the meeting: how to make metadata more accessible, more usable, and both machine and human readable.
  • There’s clearly a lot of interest in standardization in the information industry, particularly because it can help smaller players compete.
  • The discussions of AI repeatedly emphasized that an AI solution is only as good as its training data. A biased or inadequate training set will produce a biased or inadequate tool.
  • It was fantastic to see Bruce rewarded with a NISO Fellowship for his many contributions to information technology standardization, and his award was very well received by the conference attendees!

From the Support team

Infographic: Support by the numbers (2019). 267 Edifix support queries resolved; 706 eXtyles support queries resolved; 186 hours of customer training; 351 journal database submissions.

Infographic created using Venngage.

We offer a variety of training courses, both in person and online—including custom webinars and workshops for long-time users who could benefit from an eXtyles refresher! Please let us know if you’d like to discuss training opportunities.

Find Inera at upcoming conferences

Our attendance at the events below will depend on the status of each event and on other health and welfare considerations. Please watch our social media and our Events page for up-to-date info.

JATS-Con 2020 has been POSTPONED

See the JATS-Con page for the most up-to-date information.

The Council of Science Editors 2020 Annual Meeting has been POSTPONED

See the Annual Meeting page for the most up-to-date information.

Society for Scholarly Publishing 2020 Annual Meeting

Boston, MA, May 27–29

This year’s SSP Annual Meeting is in our home town, so the gang’s all here! Look for us at booth 212 in the Exhibit Hall; at the Wednesday afternoon pre-meeting sessions, where Liz Blake will be co-presenting with our partners at Cabells; and in the concurrent session program, where Sylvia Izzo Hunter will be co-moderating “Solving Problems with and for the Problem Solvers: Valuing Disability in the Publishing Industry” and Bruce Rosenblum will be a panelist on “Revolutionary Standards: An Oxymoron or a Reality?” The preliminary meeting program is now available!

See the SSP Annual Meeting page for the most up-to-date information.

Atypon Engage User Meeting

Boston, MA, May 30

We look forward to meeting more Atypon customers at this year’s North American user meeting!

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Please contact us if you’d like to schedule a meeting! If you were planning to meet with us at one of the events above but are unable to do so for any reason, please contact us to set up a phone call or online meeting instead.

Working with Word

Word Tip: Using QuickParts to track document updates

If you use Word regularly, you already know that it offers a huge array of shortcuts and automations. Located on the Insert tab, the QuickParts menu is one of these—in fact, it’s three of them: Insert Field, Insert Document Property, and Insert AutoText.

You can do all sorts of useful things with Insert Field. One of the most common is ensuring that document updates are accurately tracked. Using the QuickParts menu, you can create a timestamp statement in the document header or footer that will update automatically whenever the document is opened and saved; your timestamp can include just the date, the date and time, or the date, time, and user name or user initials.

Here’s how to create your timestamp! For this example, we’ll include the full name of the user updating the document, as well as the date and time.

→ Tip: To make sure you can see exactly what’s going on in your file, make sure you have Show Nonprinting Characters turned on and set File>Options>Advanced>Field Shading to Always.

  1. In the header, footer, or body of your document, type the static parts of the text you want.
  2. Place your cursor between the first two double spaces. Go to Insert > QuickParts > Field, which brings up the list of available fields:
  3. To add the author’s name, first choose User Information from the list:
  4. Then choose UserName from the shortlist and click OK. Your timestamp should now include the UserName field:
  5. To add the date, repeat steps 2-4, but this time choose Date and Time from the main Insert > QuickParts > Field dialog, then choose SaveDate from the Field names: list and select a date format:
  6. To add the time, choose Time from the Field names: list and select a time format. Your final result should look something like this:

→ Tip: If you’re not picky about syntax, you can save steps by inserting a single field that includes both date and time!

But that’s not all! Using QuickParts > AutoText, you can create your auto-updating timestamp once, then save it to use in future documents. Here’s how:

  1. Once you’ve got your timestamp the way you want it, including applying any appropriate paragraph and character styles, select the entire paragraph (including the paragraph mark at the end.)
  2. On the Insert tab, choose QuickParts > AutoText > Save Selection to AutoText Gallery:
  3. Give your new Building Block a name (by default, Word will pick up the first few words of the selected text), choose a Gallery to put it in, and in the Options: dropdown, choose Insert content in its own paragraph. Click OK.

    → Tip: Choosing Insert content in its own paragraph ensures that any paragraph- and character-level formatting you’ve applied to your Building Block text will be saved along with the text itself. 
  4. Now that you’ve saved this AutoText block to your Normal template, you can find it and insert it into any Word document by going to Insert > QuickParts > AutoText and choosing it from the pop-out menu:

The fields will update based on current user name, date, and time information.

Stay tuned for more QuickParts tips and tricks in future newsletters!

Have an intractable Word problem you’d love to solve? Have a clever tip to share? Send it to us at [email protected]!

Happy St. Patrick’s Day! ☘️