So, you think you know the „storefront of memoQ”—the main editor screen? You know it inside out as you stare at it for a few hours every day, right? Yeah—I thought so, too, and then one of my students showed me a feature I hadn’t noticed before.
For me, the View pane has always been just a place to preview files, if the preview was available at all. My student pointed out that I can display QA warnings there, too, so I no longer need to press CTRL+W to display the list of issues in a segment. That was a game changer for me! * Then we both noticed that the F10 key switches between the HTML Preview, Review, and Active Comments sections in the View pane.
Later, I asked one of my fellow translators if she knew the “F10 trick.” She did not, but she found it as useful as I did. Then I decided to make note of all the lesser known features of the main screen that I know. Perhaps some of you will also find them useful!
Let’s stay in View pane for a while. The Active Comments tab displays full context in a more user-friendly way than in the bar just below the editor (1). Moreover, you can highlight and copy the contents of the context if you want (2).
In the top right section of the screen there is a downward-pointing arrow icon: It enables switching to any of the opened documents. Perhaps more important, it also allows closing all open documents with one click (particularly useful when you misclick during view preparation and dozens of files get opened one by one).
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Slightly to the left and a bit lower is the eye icon. Click it to get to the Translation results settings. If you are getting more hits than you want to deal with, you can click the same icon once and “turn a blind eye on them” (1).
You can customize the ribbon. Just right-click it and select the Customize ribbon command.
What I found really nice here was the ability to add small icons to the Quick access toolbar. You can put virtually any command as an icon at the top of the screen.
However, the feature that has saved me tons of time is the ability to copy file names to the clipboard. It’s always irritated me to have to switch from memoQ to Explorer or Total Commander to copy a file name. Because the names of files in large projects tend to be similar, I often end up copying the wrong name. With this feature, you just need to right-click the tab name (1) or the Doc string (2) and you can copy the file name to your clipboard, even with the whole path.
When there are documents within a view, right-click the file name below the editor window (1).
Did you know that double-clicking in the status column makes some features a bit easier to use? Double-click:
- the confirmation/red x to lock/unlock the segment (red arrow)
- the “speech bubble” icon to open the Comments dialog (purple arrow)
- the match rate to open status change dialog (green arrow)
One last tip for now: In the bottom left corner, you see the job completeness percentage. When you right-click it, you can quickly change the basis on which the completeness percentage is calculated.
These are my tips and hacks for the main window of memoQ’s editor. You know any others? Do share, I am always ready to learn new tricks!
*Displaying warnings with CTRL+W has one huge advantage, though—you can ignore any false positives using only the keyboard. Just press the Tab key four times, and then Space—the issue will be ignored. Close the dialog with Esc and you’re done. No mouse needed.
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