The first time that a customer told me they wanted PerfectIt for PowerPoint, I tried not to laugh. Our Chief Engineer and I joked about it. We even drew up a specification document for what it would look like. No matter what slide you ran it on, it would simply say “Use fewer words”.

However, the requests for PerfectIt for PowerPoint kept coming. We track every single request (no matter how odd it seems to us). We stopped joking when we reached five. At ten, we knew we had to understand more and we started researching it properly. At fifty requests, including from some of the biggest companies in the world, we started development.

Ken Olsen, the founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, famously said in 1977, “There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home.”

The first time you see an artificial intelligence (AI) product like ChatGPT take on an editing task, its suggestions will amaze you. Its editing is impressive. Then the fear sets in.

One of the joys of working on PerfectIt is the engagement of our users. I love the requests you send, ideas you bring, and the problems you ask us to solve. But what I think makes PerfectIt stand out and makes it so useful is that it doesn’t do everything. We design for professionals.

From the outside it must look foolish. Is there really an editing software product that is not only avoiding AI, but actively marketing itself as not including AI? There is. And we’re proud to be that company.

The speed of today’s technological changes may be unprecedented, but the essence of adaptation remains the same as it has throughout history. The key lies in picking the best tool for each specific task to improve overall outcomes.

There’s no one right way to run your business, only the way that works for you at any given moment. It’s all trial and error. Efficiency isn’t about what you do so much as doing it the same way every time.

While not everyone may have been aware of or effected by it, we recently had an outage of PerfectIt Cloud. Now, outages are the worst. You already know that. They mean you can’t access the service you paid for. And they often hit right before a deadline.

One of the most effective quality-control and disaster-prevention tools ever developed is also one of the simplest: the checklist. Surgeons use checklists. Astronauts use checklists. Stage managers use checklists. And editors use checklists.

Spoiler alert: you probably didn’t lose your last bid because of price. It also probably wasn’t because the deal was fixed from the outset. These are the consolations many companies tell themselves when they are unsuccessful in tenders. We get it. You put all your best people on a tender and committed vast amounts of time and resources to it.

If you're writing a thesis or dissertation, you only need to use PerfectIt once. And a fully functioning version of PerfectIt is free for 14 days (for Mac or PC). So after you've proofread your dissertation, run PerfectIt for free. PerfectIt will quickly help you find any remaining errors.

The first thing you need for truly great corporate documents is a truly great style guide. Knowing it all off the top of your head is not good enough. You’re not the only person handling the text and you may leave the company someday. More importantly, no human can ever be one hundred percent consistent.

Independent editors play a crucial role across nearly every industry. However, if you run your own editing business then you know how difficult it can be to find time to market your services. That’s why we’ve put together this guide to help you demonstrate and market your value.

So much of life is about who’s in your set. Word’s wildcards are really no different. Most of us have a ‘crowd’ that we feel some sort of affinity with. Professional groups, special interests; type of food or music we like; and so on.

Are you getting the most you can from Microsoft Word? Wildcard search is one of the most powerful features in Word. You can use it to quickly find errors and make changes throughout a document in a matter of seconds. However, wildcards can be complicated. Even advanced users can struggle to keep track of wildcard patterns and their meaning. The Wildcard Cookbook by Jack Lyon makes it all easier.

Health conditions are varied and complicated. They can cause pain, confusion, dizziness, slack jaw, belly aches… and that’s just their names! Take for example Stein-Leventhal syndrome, polycystic ovary syndrome, chronic hyperandrogenic anovulation, CHA, and PCOS. As different as they look, these five have something in common: they’re all names for the same thing.

You’re in a management or leadership role, so you have to review draft documents. The question is: Do you micromanage your review? You’re a good manager, so you don’t micromanage other tasks.

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.

Creating content for a non-specialist audience means thinking differently about medical information. The increasing requirement for plain language summaries, including the European Union Clinical Trials Regulation, reflects the growing emphasis on improving patient involvement. But translating complex medical terms to non-specialist language can be time consuming. We get so used to medical terminology, it’s easy to miss things when checking. We’ve created a medical plain language summary style in PerfectIt to help with the challenge!

In December 2022 we launched our Medical Plain Language Summary style. It’s launched in beta as a living document, and we hope that the medical writing community will continue giving us feedback so that we can keep making it more useful for medical communicators working with plain language summaries.