Hola. I
wrote this entry specifically for my fellow classmates who are now struggling for
our Research Methodology subject (Bless us, may we survive till the end…) and
all of you who read this, to maximize the usage of your Microsoft Word. Because
I myself never used any of those features till I have to write professional
scientific report =))
We’ll start from Table of Contents. When
you only have 5 pages paper, writing table of contents manually is still quite
easy and updating the content and the page numbers are not really a bothersome.
But how if your report is 100 pages? Go back and forth checking the page
numbers each time you add one word? No, thank you, I’m not that patient. I
might have already kicked my laptop screen before I’m done with 5 lines of
table of contents :| So here’s on how we utilize Microsoft Word to do the job
for us.
Before
you start typing any letter in your document, set up your Styles first. Yeah, I mean the Styles over here:
Trust
me, it’s way easier than have to change the font and size and such each time
you alternate between typing contents and header. You know how the universal
standard of font is Times New Roman 12pt and Word decided to be a hipster and
choose Calibri 11pt? Here’s how to get Word to follow the universal standard:
- Right click each style you want to modify, and click Modify. Here are five important style that normally used: Normal style is for paragraph body, Heading 1 is for the big title on each chapter (e.g. Chapter 1: Introduction), Heading 2 is for first level of sub-heading (e.g. 1.1 Background), Heading 3 is for the second level of sub-heading (e.g. 3.3.1 [Insert the topic title here]), and Heading 4 is if you need to divide the second level of sub-heading into smaller group of topics. The rest are optional, if you think you will use any in your document, you may as well Modify it to your needs. If no, leave it be.
3. When you’re done setting all the Styles, time to write down your report! Simply select the appropriate Styles when writing, e.g. select the Heading 1 then write your Chapter title, then Enter and when you’re going to write the paragraph contents, select Normal, and so forth, like this:
Now you have Table of Contents like this:
Now we’re done with Table of Contents, don’t forget you also
had to have Table of Figures and put Caption under each figure in your
document. Here’s how to add Caption under
each Figure:
Click the Insert
Caption under References menu,
then the Caption window will pop up.
Add the text inside the Text Box, for example, Figure 1: Organizational Chart. Click OK.
Then to add Table of Figures, put your cursor on the new page
after Table of Contents, write the Table
of Figures title using Heading 1 style,
and then click Insert Table of Figures.
This window will pop up:
Adjust to your needs. Click OK after done.
To update your Table of Figures, you can simply click the Update Table option under References menu (Beside the Insert Caption option, if you can’t
find it).
We’re done with the Table of Contents and Figure remark, now
for the Citation and Bibliography. As we all know, the university is very
strict about adding sources for any quotes we take from other sources. Because
manually adds Bibliography and the Citation remark after each quote is a
hassle, here’s how to get Word do it for us.
To add new source, click the New… option. This Create Source window will pop up:
Then add all the identities of each source.
There are options whether your source is a book, a section from a book, a
journal article, an article section from a periodical journal, a report, and
many more (other people’s thesis and papers categorized as Report) choose
according to your source type, and fill up all necessary boxes. If there are
many Authors, you can click Edit
beside the Author box, and fill up
each author’s first and last name and click Add to add as many authors as needed. Click OK after done.
Don’t forget to set the Language option to English
(UK or US, doesn’t matter) or foreign letters might appear in your Bibliography.
Do this after you type the quote:
Click Insert
Citation under the References
menu, and then select which source the quote is from. If you haven’t added the
source, click the Add New Source and
do the steps explained previously to add the sources.
3. Now
let’s move to the next step, which is adding Bibliography.
Click Bibliography
under References menu, then choose
the Bibliography style. You can also
click Insert Bibliography and
customized the style up to your needs. Later, the bibliography will be like
this:
To update the Bibliography table, put your cursor anywhere
inside the table to make the options shown, just like on how to update the
Table of Contents. Then click Update
Citations and Bibliography.
Done. So that’s all about it. If you have more questions (in
case I missed something), fire it up on the comments.
Oh, one thing, I still don’t know on how to make the page
numbers on the Opening sections (Abstract, table of contents etc) and the
contents section different. The only way I know is setting it on two different
documents but it’s also quite a hassle. If anyone knows on how to make the page
numbers different, please share!
Thank you for reading this long post!
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