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Anne Fisher’s recent Fortune column on “Business Buzzwords That Make You Gag” is a reminder that we all need to monitor our use of jargon, especially when we’re talking to people outside our field.

When you’ve been marinating in a particular discipline for a long time, however, your own jargon become invisible to you. So how can you tell whether something you’ve written for the press or the public will be comprehensible?

Enter Bullfighter, a Microsoft Word plugin first developed by Deloitte Consulting. It’s been taken over by FightTheBull.com, publishers of Why Business People Speak Like Idiots (also available as an audiobook).

Bullfighter is freeware, designed for use on Windows XP with Microsoft Word 2002 or above. Download, install, and reboot your computer. Next time you open Word, you’ll see the Bullfighter toolbar. When you click on the “Bullfighter” button, the program runs a “bull check,” similar to a spelling check, which highlights bull words and gives you explanations of why they’re problematic, along with the option to change them to plain-English words. You can also find out what the “Bull Index” of a given document is. And you can add new bull words as they get coined.

If you provide consumer products and services or work with people outside your own field, you’ll do yourself a big favor by using certified bull-free marketing copy. Download Bullfighter today.

For continuous commentary on bull trends, check out the Bull Blog .

Ah, hyperlinks. They let us do so much—but they also increase the size of your Word document. If you only have one or two links, it’s not a problem. But what if your Word doc is full of links you don’t need?

A typical trademark search report is over 20 pages long and contains hundreds of links to the USPTO’s Trademark Database. The problem is, these links expire very quickly, so by the time my client gets the search report, the links are useless and the file is huge. Even turning it into a PDF doesn’t always compress it enough to make it easy to mail.

I checked all the Edit and Format options in Word, but didn’t find a “remove all links” command. However, a Google search on the phrase “remove all hyperlinks from Word” took me to a page in the Microsoft Development Network Library with instructions on how to create a macro for removing hyperlinks.

I’m a complete beginner when it comes to macros, but this one is very simple to set up, and it worked like a charm. After taking 5 minutes to set it up in the Visual Basic Edtior, I clicked Tools | Macro | Macros, selected the “Remove Hyperlinks” macro, and clicked Run. Within a few seconds I’d taken 200K off my 800K search report.

If you have documents that are full of unnecessary hyperlinks, I urge you to try this.

I discovered today that I’m not the only cat lover who has to fight to protect her computer from a Furry Fiendette. If I’m actually using the laptop, Misty prefers to hasten the onset of RSI by sitting on my wrists while I type, but if I make the mistake of walking away and leaving it open, she settles herself down on the keyboard. Not surprisingly, when my computer repair guy opened up my late notebook to try to fix the power supply problem, it was full of cat hair.

The cat also has an impressive ability to step on the Num Lock key or even shut the machine down just by strolling across it. (That’s a combination of keystrokes I have yet to discover for myself.)

BitBoost Systems has an answer to this problem: a program calledPawSense that detects “cat-like typing” and blocks further keyboard input until you enter a password proving you’re human.

PawSense works with almost all flavors of Windows, from 95 to XP, and it appears there’s a Mac version in the works.

I must say I’m seriously tempted—though it will take more than software to keep the cat hair out.