As a Mac user, I’ve often read Twitter and Facebook feeds enviously where other editors enthused about Intelligent Editing’s proofreading software, PerfectIt. Adrienne Montgomerie’s review of PerfectIt 3 in 2015 particularly made me drool. Well, my drooling days are over!
Intelligent Editing has just released PerfectIt Cloud, the first version of PerfectIt available for Mac operating systems. I was one of the lucky beta testers who got to preview this new version before its official release date.
My beta version came through just in time: I was working on a project that involved large documents that had been written by multiple authors. This was the perfect test for PerfectIt, which is designed to eliminate inconsistencies in usage and style — the kinds of errors that are easy to miss and can eat away at your valuable time via endless Find/Replace cycles if you (like me) aren’t an expert in macros.
PerfectIt Cloud requires either Office 365 or Office 2016 to run. This was a blow to me, as I’ve zealously been clinging to my 2011 Office for Mac, but it was finally time to embrace change. I opted for the one-year Office 365 licence and plunged in.
Installing and launching PerfectIt Cloud was effortless. PerfectIt runs a series of tests on your document (remember to hide any markup beforehand) to check for errors and inconsistencies. Some of the tests were time-consuming, but the results were impressive: PerfectIt flagged inconsistencies that I’d missed or been completely unaware of, as they’d been swallowed up by the sheer size of the document. As someone whose pet peeve is inconsistency, I’m thrilled to now have a tool that can spot it for me. I also liked the fact that I could manually choose to skip or run specific tests.
My only major disappointment was this: PerfectIt Cloud does not yet support custom style sheets. Key word is yet. The program currently offers built-in styles (e.g. Canadian, U.K. or U.S. spelling, to name a few), and gradually all the features available in PerfectIt 3 will be phased in, but the technical steps involved mean that support for custom style sheets will take some time.
Occasionally the program was sluggish, which I suspect was due to the fact that our Internet connection in rural Alberta is often poor. Because PerfectIt Cloud operates from, well, the Cloud, Internet speed has an impact. There were also a couple of times where PerfectIt missed inconsistencies; this was probably due to a Microsoft bug that causes the program to sometimes skip items with tracked changes in the middle of them, even when those tracked changes are hidden.
Overall, I’m stoked to finally have this popular Word add-in. PerfectIt will be integrated into my editing routine whenever I’m working on large documents.
PerfectIt Cloud was provided free of charge by Intelligent Editing. The opinions contained in this review are those of the reviewer alone and were written free of any obligation or agreement with the developer.
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Anna Williams
Anna Williams is a freelance technical editor, writer and consultant in Edmonton, Alberta. She was the managing editor of the Editors’ Weekly from 2013 to 2020.