I've had an initial interview for a full-time editing job that would be a great fit. However, all of the editing must be done in Google Docs, often with two or more people working on a document simultaneously. Does anyone here use Google Docs heavily? If so, could you tell me whether it would be feasible to take a job that required editing all day in Google Docs? I have some basic knowledge of Advanced Scripting and would be willing to program commands to ease the editing process.

 

Many thanks in advance for your input.

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The KnowBrainer 2022 Type <dictation> command allows you to quickly edit your text (assuming dictation is available). You still have to select words with your mouse but this command allows you to dictate corrections with proper spacing and even proper capitalization. For example, if you double-click a word that you wish to edit and accidentally pick up an extra space, this KnowBrainer command will put the space back. If you double-click a word that's capitalized, such as changing the word “Brown” to “Blue”, when you say Type <blue>, the capitalized word Brown will be changed to the capitalized word Blue. This is an AI command that Dragon can't do and 1 of a thousand reasons we created KnowBrainer. You'll find a 30 day trial in our signature tag

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Thanks for the reply, Lunis. I've been experimenting with Google Docs, and it seems like the big problem is selecting text rather than spacing and capitalization. It accepts commands such as Move Up 2 Lines, Select Forward 5 Words, etc. But the inability to say Select X through Y and Insert Before/After X will be a real time suck - probably enough to rule me out for this job. I can use a trackpad to place the cursor, but doing so continually throughout the day, day after day, will make matters worse for me physically (old nerve damage). There's the MouseGrid, of course. Curse you, Google, for not implementing Select-and-Say.

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Writing and editing (my main website):  Welcome - Words for Sale

The woman who dueled with Aaron Burr and won: www.MmeJumel.com

Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net

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If you can't select text or drag by voice in Google Docs, how about reducing the physical effort so you never need to click or hold down a mouse button when selecting or dragging?

I've been experimenting with a minimal effort mouse drag command, and so far it works nicely.

I used Macro Express to make the command. There are about a dozen ways to trigger Macro Express scripts, but hotkeys are probably the most straightforward. But if the script is "trigger-able" by hotkey, it's a snap to trigger the script by voice. For example, if the Macro Express script is activated by pressing Alt+F10, a Dragon command called, for example, "Drag Trick," can output Alt+F10.

Maybe someone can rewrite the Macro Express script for Advanced Scripting.

Here's how it works:

1. Manually move the mouse pointer to the place you want to start the drag. No need to click. Just hover the mouse pointer over the starting location.

2. Activate the Macro Express script.

3. You now have five seconds to move the mouse pointer to the end location. Again, no need to click. (The delay is easily adjustable.)

4. Voilà! The region between the two points is selected or dragged.

Here's the script:

Mouse Left Button Down
Delay: 5000 milliseconds
Mouse Left Button Up

Alan, thanks very much for the script. I've benefited from a variety of the scripts that you have written and posted on this board.

The situation has changed a bit in Google Docs since its early days. It is now possible to select or delete characters, words, and phrases by using basic commands (e.g., Select Forward 2 Words, Select Backwards 2 Characters) although Natural Language Commands such as Select Paragraph and Select Sentence either don't work or misfire. Also, you can mark and drag images using the MouseGrid. The main problem is not being able to select words or phrases by saying them (e.g., Select "although" through "don't work") or insert them by saying "Insert After [word]" or "Insert After "word"). Also, there are a variety of blips typical of non-Select-and-Say applications (e.g., the occasional doubled letter). None of them are prohibitive on their own, but the cumulative effect makes the app much slower to use than Microsoft Word for editing. I think writing in it would be less problematic. I suggested downloading to Word for editing and uploading to Google Docs, but that suggestion received a hard no. This may not be the job for me.

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Writing and editing (my main website):  Welcome - Words for Sale

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It's a pity they are not willing to accommodate you. I feel it's their loss. That being said, let's brainstorm a little:

1. Is this job "working from home/remote" or is it slogging it out in the office? If the latter then I'd be inclined to think that it may not be worth it, unless they are willing to accommodate. We can stop right here.

2. If it remote work that you do at home. You have options. You indeed may not be able to, say, erase the whole Google Doc, and then "paste in" your edited product from Word or some Dragon-friendly editor, after they gave you a "hard no". Erasing it and pasting back leaves electronic "trails", I'd imagine.

However, you can "shadow edit". By that I mean the following (unless you are working in some "high security" situation):

First let's consider the scenario where the Google Docs you are editing are "plain text" (which obviously would make it easy).

Copy the entire body of text from the Google doc into Wordpad (e.g.), and use that as editing template. From there you can use the Wordpad file as a "shadow copy" for implementing you own "select and say" - through Google Doc's Find and Replace.

Not just single words. You can select "xxx through yyy" on your Wordpad shadow copy, then invoke "Ctrl-F" on Google Doc, and dump the entire string into the Google Doc Find and Replace window.

Now if there are hard returns involved, things may get tricky. But we can improvise.

Now let's consider the scenario where the Google Doc contains formatted text. How do we "select and say" "xxx through yyy"? Well through Google Doc's support of RegEx (a subset of what is supported on Google Sheets ... that's all I know).

You'd have to Ctrl-F the Google Doc Search and Replace box, then press the three vertical dots, and at the next screen enable "Match using regular expressions".

For single-line match of "xxx through yyy", enter xxx.*?yyy

For multi-line match of "xxx through yyy", enter xxx(.*?\n*)*?yyy

Above has been tested. Using the above multi-line RegEx search for single-line sentences may cause Google doc to hang. One good thing about Google docs is that it is essentially crash-proof in the sense that nothing gets lost. The difference between single- and multi-line is not how they look on screen, as single-line text may be wrapped, but as in whether they contain line breaks.

Anyhow, all of the above can be automated through regular desktop Dragon incorporating focus-switching to give you a semblance of real "select and say".

Finally, the "proper" way of automating Google Docs is probably through Mountain View's own "Apps Script", which AFAIK, is just a flavour of JavaScript. It looks to have a learning curve of its own. And I myself know nothing of it.

In the end, if it is a "showing up at the office" type of gig, and they are not willing to accommodate, it may not be worth it. But otherwise, there are ways to implement your own "select and say" as outlined above.

Good luck.

Ax,

 

Thank you for an exceedingly helpful post. I can't imagine why it didn't occur to me to try the Find function to get what I needed to be and Find and Replace as well. (Possibly because I have tried to do that in Adobe Acrobat Reader and you can get somewhere with Find, but the focus disappears as soon as you escape from the Find box.) "Match using Regular expressions" is a neat trick, too. It took me a few minutes to figure out that "regular expressions" is Google's name for wildcards.

 

I tried pulling out text and editing it elsewhere and pasting it back in. Tracking is required for all edits, which makes that process problematic. If I fix a paragraph and paste it back in, the tracking shows that I have changed the entire paragraph rather than only certain words within it. If I download the document into Word and edit it with tracking, I can upload it to Google Docs and preserve the tracking, but it increases the time required for editing. 

 

I agree with you about the learning curve for Apps Script. In Google's coding academy, they discuss the use of the script with Sheets, Maps, and Gmail rather than Docs, although there is material relating to Docs elsewhere. The further complication is that I don't know if I'd be allowed to use Apps Script to make modifications. The job involves adding text to a proprietary database built for the company on a Google Docs foundation and then editing the text within the database. 

 

All in all, you've given me lots of ideas. At this point, I'm thinking that there are enough options that I could take a job that required occasional use of Google Docs for collaboration. However, trying to use it all day, every day, could be exhausting. This is not a work from home job, by the way—not even hybrid. But that's the breaks.

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Writing and editing (my main website):  Welcome - Words for Sale

The woman who dueled with Aaron Burr and won: www.MmeJumel.com

Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net

Just checking back to add a new piece of Google Docs information for those who might be interested. Google Docs has a text dictation option that you can use by going to the Tools menu and choosing Voice Typing or by pressing Control + Shift + S (using the same keyboard command to toggle it on and toggle it off). It's balky in a lot of ways (for example, the microphone will stop responding to the toggle and can only be started again manually), but it allows selecting words by voice without going through the Find menu. However (as far as I can tell with my minimal investigation), it doesn't have the capacity to say Insert Before/After (word/phrase). The selecting process also works much more slowly than in Dragon, but that may be, at least in part, because it is not accessing my preferred microphone. I might be able to do something about that; not sure yet.

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Writing and editing (my main website):  Welcome - Words for Sale

The woman who dueled with Aaron Burr and won: www.MmeJumel.com

Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net

It doesn't surprise me, Scribe, that someone with your drive and willingness to explore options would have a good idea as to what works for you and what doesn't.  As I am (aren't we all) getting older and my own index finger gets creaky and sore from all the clicking, I am more and more interested in "accessibility" solutions myself.  To me the value of this website and the crowd that participate here go beyond "mere" voice recognition.

Now rounding out the topic, without using Apps Script (into which I have zero knowledge myself), let's simulate a full sequence of hands-free approximation of the Dragon "select xxx through yyy" on Google Docs, as a proof-of-concept exercise, assuming we have registered "xxx" and "yyy" into variables already:

Ctrl+H: Directly brings up the Docs Find and Replace "modal dialog"

Ctrl+Shift+I: Opens up Chrome Console (may need to click on the "Console" tab manually if "Elements" tab was defaulted), and shift focus there

Paste into Chrome Console (at the cursor) and press Enter: document.querySelector("#docs-findandreplacedialog-use-regular-expressions-label").click();

Return to Docs "Find and replace" dialog, and enter xxx(.|\n)*yyy (selects xxx through yyy in a "greedy" sense)

Return to the Chrome Console, and paste in and press Enter: document.querySelector(".modal-dialog-title-close").click();

There was a sequence of approximation.

Now a bit of discussion:

1.  RegEx is indeed nothing but "advanced wildcards".  My own understanding in this topic is quite limited.  We are not "computer people" after all.  Most of us just need (or want) to know the bare minimum to get us by.  Having said that, I'd love to have an "accessible" course on modern RegEx techniques.  Someday.

In google sheets, one could specify "flags" to enable multi-line searches, etc.  I can't figure out what the formatting for that is on Docs, or whether Docs even supports the flags in the first place.  After all, Docs supposedly supports a "subset" of the RegEx that's used on Sheets.  And apparently Sheets doesn't even support the "full set".  We'll have to let "proper computer people" tell us what the "full set" is.  This stuff gets stoopid fast.  And Computer People everywhere are too busy churning out next-generation spam through "generative AI" nowadays ... Sorry I digress.

Try either xxx(.|\n)*yyy or xxx(.|\n)*?yyy as the difference of the "?" at the end of the operator determines "greedy" vs "ungreedy" search.  Trying both you'll know what I mean.  "|" is just "or".  "\n" is newline.  ".*" is just the standard "0 or more" of any character "wildcard".

Above does NOT cause Google Docs to hang, unlike "xxx(.*?\n*)*?yyy" (so don't use that one).  Here let's give a plug to Ag, who is not wrong in charging "modern software producers" of turning out shoddy products.  For a flagship offering like Google Docs, there is no excuse for it to crash when "students" enter a RegEx formula into its search box.  But that's the state of the matter.  At least Google Docs don't crash into ether.

2.  Chrome Console is more for debugging by amateurs.  I am an amateur and therefore I use it from time to time for my own purposes. 

 

If one uses certain browser-based apps consistently and repetitively, some basic knowledge on CSS-Selectors is worth acquiring, IMO.

3.  Lastly, once you have the CSS-Selector for an element, and you wish to drive it with desktop Dragon, you can use Mark (mdl)'s Click by Voice browser Extension to "click" it, even without the numbering.  I don't know the mechanistic details as I am a cloud Dragon user still.  I just know that he has made provisions for that in Click by Voice.

Anyway, wish you all the success in occasional use of Google Docs for productive purposes.

Scribe, I can empathize with this situation quite a bit. I'm also a writer and I have to do a fair amount of work in GD. Here's what I have strung together:

 

I'm lucky enough with this job that I can often create my own documents in Word, do the writing I need to do, and then upload them to GD for collaboration or editing. At that point, it tends not to be a heavy amount of editing in GD.

 

I have tried Voice Typing (it's so annoying that there is no insert before/after!). Let me know if you get along well with that but honestly I tend to keep abandoning it because it's a pain.

 

I use Speech Productivity 7 and Voice Computer. I tend to dictate and edit all of my text when I am working directly in GD within a Speech Productivity text editor and then paste into GD. It's a little annoying to have the extra step of switching windows and pasting but alas, dictating directly into GD often produces errors that are then difficult to correct because there is no select-and-say.

 

It sounds like you've already made your decision about the job, and I think it makes sense. I'm lucky in that my employer is very accommodating and open-minded about the different workflows and programs I need to succeed. I wouldn't want to be in a work environment, if I could help it, where I felt my employer was grudgingly approving my requests. There's already enough shame and insecurity when you are working with the disability, that you don't need any external friction.

 

The last technical thing I'll say is that I have had inconsistent success with downloading Google Docs as Word docs and then uploading them back to Google Docs (if sharing with other people). Sometimes it remains the "same" document and is still shared with previous collaborators, many other times it's uploaded as a new document that is not synced with the same people it was shared with before.

 

I've gone quite high up Google's disability support team on this one and it seems like something that they don't really support or know a lot about why it works sometimes and not others. 

Ax,

 

Thank you again for all the time you've put into this and for some really interesting ideas. I'm going to save your posts; I am sure I will be referring back to them to solve Google Docs problems in the future.

 

Brooklyn Cabin,

 

Thank you for chiming in with your personal experience. The more I experiment with Voice Typing, the more I agree with you ("it's a pain"). It's too buggy to be helpful in improving workflow.

 

I appreciate the warning about the download/upload issue (Google to Word to Google). I wasn't aware of it, and it is good to be forewarned.

 

I'm glad that you have an accommodating employer. As you presumed, I've gone ahead and pulled out of consideration for the job I interviewed for. I can't be angry at the employer because I can see why they need to have everyone using the same database. But job hunting does get frustrating. The last job I interviewed for fell apart when I mentioned that I used voice-recognition software at at the end of the second interview. It turned out that most people worked shoulder to shoulder in an open-plan office and they wouldn't or couldn't accommodate someone who would be talking into a mic.

 

At least I have a steady if very low paid freelance gig to keep me employed. I expect that I will get good use out of what I have learned of Google Docs in some future job, even though working in a Google Docs-only office is not feasible.

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Writing and editing (my main website):  Welcome - Words for Sale

The woman who dueled with Aaron Burr and won: www.MmeJumel.com

Crohn's News Blog: www.crohns-news.net