Tag Archives: skills

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Today we’re going to look at how to create a contents page or contents list in Word. I am breaking this series up into small pieces, so we have already learned about setting up headings and then numbering them.

You will use this to save yourself time and ensure consistency when you’re setting up a large document and you want it to have a contents page. You can do it manually, but it is FAR easier to do it this way.

First, have a look at the two headings articles to make sure you understand how to assign headings and how to number them (if you want to).

Now, for the purposes of making a more interesting contents page, I’ve popped each heading onto a separate page (and we all know how to do that, don’t we!)

So the text is all set up, with headings that are also numbered, and each heading is on a separate page. Now we’re going to put our cursor at the beginning of the document, and make sure we’re in the References tab.

You can see the Table of Contents button highlighted – click on that and have a look at the box that comes up:

Here we have lots of different styles of contents page to choose between. Either double click on the one you want – I clicked on the first one – or click once to highlight it and then Insert Table of Contents. And look what appears! Magic!

You can see lots of lovely headings and their numbers, all laid out nice and clearly (imagine if this was a PhD or another long document with lots of sub-headings.

But what happens if we need to change something in the text? Look – there’s a problem with the document here …

I can see that I should have typed “How Much it Costs” for section 3, and it’s on page 8 along with Section 2, when it should be on page 9. Oh no!

So let’s go to page 8, move the heading onto page 9 and amend the heading itself:

Great – so now the text is sorted out and the heading is on page 9, where it should be. How do we update the Table of Contents to reflect this change?

Go back to the Table of Contents and highlight it (it all comes up in blue if you click on one bit of it). Left click and you should find it puts everything in grey and gives you a little tab at the top like this.

You can use this to change all sorts of attributes on the contents page, or you can just click on Update Field from here or left click when you have the contents list in blue in the last step, and you get this choice:

I always choose Update entire table, just in case. And with one click, it’s updated the Contents list to match the document.

So, no more fiddling around doing a contents page by hand. As long as you set up your headers, you can insert and update your Contents page however you want and whenever you want – so much easier!

This is why, if you use my proofreading services, I will put a note on your contents page reminding you to update it at the last minute, to take into account any changes we might have made to your pagination or heading numberings. Update the Contents page at the very last stage, and it’ll be completely accurate and up to date.

If you have enjoyed this post and found it useful, please click on the “share” buttons below or tell your friends and colleagues about it! Thank you!

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Today we’re going to look at how to set up numbered headings in Word. I am breaking this series up into small pieces, so we have already learned about setting up headings and next time we’ll learn about creating contents pages, too.

You will use this to save yourself time and ensure consistency when you’re setting up a large document with lots of headings and sub-headings.

So, here’s our text with lots of headings and bits of text under them as we left it last time. We have assigned heading 1, heading 2 etc. styles to them so they make sense and are consistent. But they’re still a bit unclear and I think we would all agree that it would make things a bit clearer if we numbered the headings. But how to do that so the sub-headings have sub-numbers, etc.?

Here’s how to do it. First, make sure you’re on the Home tab in Word. Then, concentrate on the paragraph section. There should be a little icon like the one I’ve circled; when you hover the mouse over it you’ll get a note that this is the multilevel list tool. Make sure your cursor is next to the first heading and click on the multilevel list button.

Up will pop a menu which gives you lots of choices – a list library. We’d like to go for the one that gives us 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 etc. (see arrow) so we pick that and click on it.

Select the kind of list you want and look back at your text. Amazing – it’s now got heading and sub-heading numbers!

And look what’s happened to your heading style buttons now you’re back in your document. The numbering style has been added to them. Note: there is a way to change the style of the headings when right-clicking on them. That’s all lovely and useful, but when you want to make your headings and their numbers behave themselves throughout your text, you need to do it the way I’ve shown you above.

Now let’s try adding a new sub-heading in the middle of the others. In this example, I’ve added “Line editing” in between “Substantive editing” and “Light editing” which were headings 1.2.1.1 nand 1.2.1.2 respectively (look up the post to check that if you want to). I put the cursor in the space after “Line editing”, chose Heading 4, typed my heading … and not only has it assigned number 1.2.1.2 to that heading, it’s also handily moved the next heading, “Light editing” to have number 1.2.1.3 – all by itself! You can see how useful this is if you’re writing a big document and adding in sub-sections but want to keep the numbering consistent. What a nightmare it would be to do it all by hand!

And what about if you want to remove a section with a sub-heading and make sure the numbering follows suit? Here I have highlighted 1.2.2.1 “Students”, ready to delete it. Note that “Translators” has number 1.2.2.2 at the moment …

I delete “Students”, and “Translators” now has number 1.2.2.1 instead. Magic!

So, in summary, if you have a document with lots of headings and sub-headings, and you want to number them, for example in a report, thesis or non-fiction book, use this method to apply a numbering scheme to the headings, and whatever you delete or add, as long as you tell Word that you’re adding a heading and what kind of heading it is, it will sort out all the numbering for you and ensure it makes sense. Hooray, frankly!

Next time, we’ll look at creating an automatic contents page, and how that will help make your document easy to navigate …

If you have enjoyed this post and found it useful, please click on the “share” buttons below or tell your friends and colleagues about it! Thank you!

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

Today we’re going to look at how to set up headings in Word. I am breaking this series up into small pieces, so we will be learning about setting up numbered headings and creating contents pages too.

You will use this to save yourself time and ensure consistency when you’re setting up a large document with lots of headings and sub-headings. Imagine I’ve written a document about what I do in my business. I might write it up like this (you can imagine the one-word sentences are longer paragraphs if that helps!)

It’s not very easy to see what’s a heading and what’s the text, though. So I might think up my own styles of headings or sub-headings (yes, I might number them, too, but let’s keep it simple for now) and do this:

All well and good, but if this is a great big document: am I going to remember that I put main headings in bold, sub-headings in italics, etc., etc.? Or am I going to get in a mess and make my document confusing, so when you read it you don’t know which kind of section you’re in?

This is where the pre-set headings available in Word come into their own. If you’re using Word 2003, you’ll need to be using the formatting toolbar, then styles. If you’re using Word 2007 or Word 2010, then you’re on the Home tab of the ribbon at the top. Have a look: can you see some boxes labelled Heading 1, etc.?

I’ve circled Heading 1, and the arrow points at a scroll bar that will let you see a whole range of different things you can do.

Now you’ve located the headings buttons, you need to highlight the text you want to mark as Heading 1, and click on the Heading 1 button

And there it is, changed into blue (it doesn’t have to be blue, or that size; we’ll look at that in the next session) and every time you mark a heading as Heading 1, it will look like that.

Note: you don’t have to have all the text already written, highlight and click. You can also click Heading 1 (or whatever) when you want to type a new heading; the text on that line will adopt the Heading 1 format until you press return.

Time to do the Heading 2 level now. Oh – if you want to be clever, highlight each example of a heading you want to change to Heading 2, keeping the Control button pressed on your keyboard as you do so. This will highlight all the text you want to alter at once, saving a few clicks.

Anyway – highlight your Heading 2 text, all together or one at a time, and click on the Heading 2 button.

You’ll notice that Word has realised you’re setting levels of headings and has helpfully moved the button for Heading 3 up to the top row now, to save you looking for it (see the blue arrow). How useful!

Now, carry on highlighting and choosing heading levels until the whole document is done. You’ll end up with something like this:

Now, maybe this doesn’t look very different from what we started off with. But three things make this better than what we started with:

1. You don’t have to remember what look you’re using for each level of heading; it does it all for you
2. If you want to number your headings, that’s going to be really easy to do, AND if you change sections, swap them around, add or delete them, the numbering will change automatically
3. You will be able to create an automatic Table of Contents

Next time, we’ll look at assigning numbers to all the different heading levels, and how that will help make your document easy to navigate …

If you have enjoyed this post and found it useful, please click on the “share” buttons below or tell your friends and colleagues about it! Thank you!

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

I have already published instructions on how to manipulate your left and right margins, but I’ve noticed some search engine searches have come through to Libro looking for information on top and bottom margins, so here are a few words about them.

First of all, make sure you can see your rulers! If you can’t see what I’m pointing to in the screenshots, go to this post and follow the instructions on making your rulers visible. I’ll wait here while you do that …

OK, all set, and rulers visible?

So, sometimes we might want to make the area we can use on the page a bit bigger. Classic reasons include wanting to fit a whole document on one or two pages, for example if you are making up a poster and you want to use the largest print area possible. Within reason, you can extend the upper and lower margins of your text to fit in a few more words.

Let’s have a look at these top and bottom margins. Look over to the left-hand ruler in your document. You should see this, which you will notice looks very similar to your top ruler:

You will notice that the white section indicates the area where you can type: where the space for text starts at the top (above) and where it finishes at the bottom:

Hover your cursor over the division between blue and white and you’ll see a slider and an arrow indicating that you can move them up and down. In this example, I’ve moved the top margin down – see how the first line of text has followed it down the page …

But of course you can also move it up if you want more room to type.

Do note, that you can’t move it infinitely and eventually, when you go to print, you will get an error message telling you that you have gone outside the print margins. So be careful, but within reason this will allow you to create that little bit more space on your page.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

If you have enjoyed this post and /or found it useful, please click the share buttons below or comment!

Find all the short cuts here …

This is part of my series on how to avoid time-consuming “short cuts” and use Word in the right way to maximise your time and improve the look of your documents.

We’re looking at margins and indents today. By reading through these steps, you’ll learn how to produce tidy indented paragraphs and quotes within paragraphs, quickly and easily, without having to mess around with the space bar and enter key.

We often want to indent the beginning of a paragraph to make it look like more of a break from the last one, or have the first line of text longer and the subsequent ones indented (this is useful if you’re preparing a bibliography). Also, if you’re writing a thesis, dissertation or non-fiction book, it’s useful to indent large quotations to make them stand out as being a quotation. More often than not, I find people either don’t know how to do this using the rulers at the top of their Word document, or they’ve forgotten how to and think they can find a quick way round the issue. This leads to all sorts of formatting problems, especially if you’re going to (as is inevitable) add and remove text as you go along.

First things first: check that you can see your rulers in Word. If your document has a blank space at the top instead of a ruler, click on the “view” tab at the top of the screen:

How to make margins appear in Word

Look at “ruler” and see if the box is empty or contains a tick. If it’s empty, click on the box. Your rulers (top and side) should now appear:

making margins appear in Word

Now let’s look at setting the indents. The important thing to note here is the slider which appears at the beginning of the white part of the ruler, marking where the text starts, or the location of the left hand margin.  Note first of all that the slider’s position matches the text’s position on the page – they are both situated at the left margin.

Let’s look at how moving this slider either all in one, or the top and bottom independently, affects a block of text. First of all we take the pointer and click down on the square block at the bottom of the slider. This picks up the whole thing and, when you move your mouse (holding the button down still) the slider will move across. Very important: when you’re moving sliders or setting tabs, make sure you have highlighted the section of text you want to affect. If you don’t do this, whatever you do on the ruler will only apply to the point at which the cursor is located. You probably don’t want to do that. So: let’s move the slider across to the right a little …

The black lines here mark the borders of the text area, and you can see that moving the slider as a whole has moved all the text across. Taking the slider back, what happens if we move just the top one across a bit?

You can do this using the tab key, too – but the useful point here is that once you’ve set it up at the beginning of a document (before you start typing), it will affect all new paragraphs in the same way, so you’ve set up a nice tidy way for your paragraphs to indent themselves throughout the text. Now what happens if we just move the bottom half of the slider?

So this works the other way around: the first line of text is longer than the next ones. This looks a bit odd in a normal paragraph, but it’s very common in bibliographies.

Here’s an example of how the user’s “short cuts” can actually make everything take longer, particularly if changes are involved. I noticed someone doing this in a dissertation I proofread recently, which is what inspired me to write this article.  I’ve turned “show formatting” on so you can see what they’ve done (dots are spaces and backwards Ps are line returns (enter)). In the first example, the author wants to have a hanging indent to make the author’s name more prominent, but they’ve done it by hand, hitting enter at the end of the line then spacing across to make the indent. All well and good (not really) until you need to enter some more text. Then look what happens:

Entering “Birmingham” has forced Birmingham: Libro onto a new line. But the line return at the end of Libro forces the next bit onto a new line (green arrow), and the second line of the entry isn’t even indented, because Word doesn’t know you want it to be (red arrow). Whoever entered “Birmingham” now has to delete the line return and take out the spaces before “Publishing” then re-set the hanging indent. Fine if it’s just once, but it won’t be. Contrast this with what happens if you set up the indents correctly in the first place:

Here, we’ve moved the bottom slider along so that the text automatically indents with a hanging indent on each paragraph. No spaces and only the required line return at the end of the entry. Now when we add “Birmingham” it merely pops itself onto the next line, nice and neat and tidy, and there’s nothing else to do.  Simple.

Now let’s have a quick look at indenting text from both margins. This is useful if you’ve got a chunk of quotation you want to insert into the text. Again, I’ve seen people put line returns at the end of each line and spaces across from the left. All well and good (again: not really) until you delete or add a word or character and it all goes odd. Here’s how you do it properly. Here’s the text we want to indent (marked with arrows):

Highlight the text you want to indent and move both the right and left sliders in from the margins:

The black lines show the text margins outlining the area where you can type. The grey lines show how the indented text lines up with the two sliders, one on the left, and one on the right.

One bonus bit of tidying up: if you set the justification to Full, you get nice neat margins both sides. You could not do this using line returns and the space bar.

So now we’ve learnt how to use the sliders on the rulers to make our text tidy and make it much easier to make insertions and deletions without messing up the formatting of the document. I hope you’ve found this useful: do post a comment or share this article if you did!

Note: I have added an article on the top and bottom margins.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

As you will have read in my original post, I’m writing up quick guides to short cuts for formatting your Word documents, to replace workarounds you might use.

I want to show you how to do things in a more formal way which will  make things easier for you in the long run, particularly when you’re dealing with long and complex documents.

Today we’re going to follow up on my previous post on Tabs. Now we know how to use the tab button, we’re going to go a step further and set tabs using the ruler at the top of the screen. Exciting, eh? It’s called “setting tab stops” – the “stops” idea coming from when you added physical barriers to your typewriter. I actually learned to type on an elecronic typewriter, back in the olden days, by the way …

First of all, we need to check we can actually see the rulers at the top and side of the page.  Can you see a ruler at the top? If not, click on the view tab at the top of the page. See where it says ruler? Click on the box next to that so a tick appears:

Once you’ve ticked the box, the two rulers should appear, like this:

And we’re all ready to go. So, say we’ve got a little table of bird prices we want to lay out:

We can use the tab key to space across, but another way is to use the tab stops in the margin. Note that we need to highlight the text we want to apply tab stops to, or set up the tab stops before we type anything. Now, move the mouse pointer up to the top margin and click, just once, with the left mouse button, on the 1.5, 6 and 13 on the ruler. Just where the arrows are on the picture below. You’ll see a little L appear where you click. That’s L for left tab. Well, actually it shows which way the tab is facing, but we’ll come on to that later.

Now, when we type our text, using the tab key (remember, the one with 2 arrows on) will take us across to each of these tab positions that we have set up ourselves, rather than just going across by a set amount. The grey lines show how the text lines up with the tab stops we marked in the top ruler area.

All well and good, but the prices don’t line up very neatly, do they. We can get around this, and mess around with the tab positions by highlighting the text we want to affect (remember to do this! And for this stage we want to highlight all the text so we move the column heading and the prices) and double clicking on any of the Ls we placed in the ruler. This brings up the tab dialogue box. Note: although you can click on any tab marker to bring this up, it automatically moves to working on the leftmost tab setting first, not the one you clicked on. So you can see one tab stop highlighted, and the other ones listed underneath. You can see that there are options to Clear or Set tabs. Set will set a new one at whatever position you want: if you add a third one between 6 and 13, all your text in the third column will jump across to match that. Clear will delete the tab position you have highlighted in the top box.

In order to line up those prices, we need to make the third tab a Right-handed one. This means the tab marker is at the right margin or, effectively, the end of the text you want to affect. So, click on the 13 in the box to bring that up as the active tab, click on the Right alignment radio button (circle).

This will make the right hand side of the column line up: lovely tidy figures and heading! Look at the tab stop at 13. It’s now a backwards L, showing that it’s keeping everything tidy to the right, not the left.

But I think the bird names want to move over a bit. Simply highlight the text, bring up the dialogue box, highlight 6 and Clear, and click Set and add a tab stop at 3.5.

Now I fancy having a line of dots going from the name to the price. A bit odd in a list of bird prices, guaranteed, but if you want to do a quick table or a contents page (although I’ll be teaching you the proper way to do that automatically in a few weeks’ time) it works nicely and looks great. Highlight just the part that you want the dots to appear in and then double click on any of the tab stops. This time, select the 13 and choose the leader you require:

And there you go: lovely leaders between each bird name and its price. That looks tidier than scrappy columns made up of spaces and dots, now, doesn’t it!

Find my first introduction to tabs and using them to make your text nice and tidy and easy to navigate here.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …

As promised in my original post, I’m going to write some quick guides to things you do when you’re writing documents which you think are a short cut but actually cause more trouble than they’re worth.

The idea of this series isn’t to criticise people, just to show you how to do things in a more formal way which will actually make things easier for you in the long run, particularly when you’re dealing with longer or more complicated documents.

Today we’re going to talk about using Tabs. Tabs seem to be something of a mystery, but there are easy ways to use both the tab button and tabs set in the top margin which will tidy up your document, make it easier to enter neat text in lovely columns, and reduce tension when you’re trying to line everything up.

Please note: these examples can look rather wide. I want them to be as near full-size as possible, so you can see exactly what I’m doing. If you’re looking at this post on a monitor, you should be able to scroll across to see the full image. If you’re viewing on a tablet, some of the screenshot may be cut off: hopefully you can see enough to get an idea of it, or you should be able to select the image to view it separately.

Let’s start off with using the Tab button. This is a button on your keyboard which should have two arrows on it, one facing one way and one the other. Got that? Good.

Here’s your common short cut, to start off with. You’ve got a menu you want to put on a document, with items in one column and prices in another. So you type it out, using the space bar to move along to the next column. And it looks like this:

But now you want to add another item and oh dear – it’s longer than all your other ones and puts it all out of alignment (because you’ve used the space bar to make the space between one column and the next):

How do I know you’ve used the space bar? Because I’ve used that little paragraph button on Word again which shows us all the formatting, tabs, line returns, etc.

So the way you’ve achieved this spacing is by doing this (where dots are spaces and the things like a backward P are returns):

What you should have done (my short cut) instead of using space (your short cut) was to use the tab key (remember, the one with the two arrows) to space across to a set point along the horizontal ruler at the top of the screen. These tabs are represented by arrows when you’re viewing the markup:

Now, when you want to move the prices over for all the shorter items, you just need to insert one press of the tab key at the end of each item, to get them to line up perfectly.

And here’s a last example. It’s very common to find people wanting to indent the first line of a paragraph, but using spaces to do so. This has its own issues – for example, you have to remember how many spaces you’ve put in and it’s likely that you’ll insert a different number each time, which will lead to indentations that don’t match. Instead, a simple press of the tab key at the beginning of your paragraph will leave everything nice and tidy

That’s enough for this session, I think. Of course, there are other ways you can format paragraphs and other indents, and you can set tab stops to wherever you want them to be across the page (and do all sorts of fancy kinds, too). But I’ll leave them for another post … (and I’ll link to them in this one when I publish them).

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007 and Word 2010, all for PC. Mac compatible versions of Word should have similar options. Always save a copy of your document before manipulating it. I bear no responsibility for any pickles you might get yourself into!

Find all the short cuts here …