This article explains the correct – and incorrect – way to add line numbers to a Word document. Why would you want to do that? Read on and find out! This works for Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013.

Why do I need to add line numbers to a Word document?

I was inspired to write this post after my colleague Katharine O’Moore Klopf mentioned that she’d been asked to do this by the editors of a journal for which she was editing an article. Presumably they wanted to be able to refer to particular line numbers in their criticism of the piece.

Transcriptions will sometimes have line numbers, if they’re going to be discussed in detail, and we can probably all recall from our dim and distant pasts working on critiques of poems and plays which had 5, 10, 15 etc. in the margins.

So these are all reasons for adding line numbers to a Word document.

How NOT to add line numbers to a Word document

If you find the need to add line numbers, it’s kind of natural that you might think – oh, I’ll just make the whole document into a numbered list. Well, to do this you would have to put a return at the end of each line to make it into a new line. Then you would highlight the whole text and add numbered bullets. But, oh, look what happens:

The numbers push the lines across and they run over onto the next line; all possibility of right justification is lost; and heaven help you if you want to insert or delete any text once you’ve done it!

So, don’t do that.

How to add line numbers to a Word document – the correct way (Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013)

Line numbering and its options can be found in Word 2007 and Word 2010 in the Page Layout tab, in the Page Setup area. There you will find Line Numbers:

Click on the arrow next to Line Numbers to bring up its Options menu:

It will automatically be set to None – choose Continuous and see what happens to your paragraphs …

Line numbers have automatically appeared, but the formatting of the text, its justification etc., remain as they were. This menu also allows to you to choose whether to restart the numbering at the beginning of each page, or each section, or to suppress the numbering for the particular paragraph your cursor is in.

Line numbering options in Word

You also have a number (sorry!) of options to choose from in order to customise your line numbering. You reach these options from the last item on the Line Numbering menu …

… although when you click on this option, you are taken into a general dialogue box for Page Layout:

and you need to click on Line Numbers… at the bottom, which will finally give you a list of options:

To go through the options in order …

• Add line numbers – this gives you the chance to add or remove them at this stage
• From text – the distance between the text and the number. Click on the arrows to choose the distance (I usually just use Auto)
• Count by – this allows you to display only every x number. I don’t think “Count by” is a particularly useful way to describe this, but scroll down to see it in action
• Numbering Restart each page / Restart each section / Continuous – this repeats the options you found on the first screen, but it’s useful to have them here if you’re generally messing around in the Page Layout menu and don’t want to go out of it to set your line numbering

Whatever you choose on here, click OK twice to get out of this dialogue box and the Page Layout one.

How do I produce a line number every five or ten lines?

You may remember from literature lessons at school that poetry and plays often have every 5th line marked. You can do this in Word by choosing that Count by option in the Line Numbering Options menu (see above for how to get to it).

Set the number to 5 …

… and as if by magic, when you return to your document after choosing OK – OK, you will find every fifth line numbered:

Working in Word 2003

In Word 2003 you will need to follow these menus: File – Page Setup:

Choose the Layout tab in the dialogue box and the Line Numbers button. Choose to Apply to the Whole document or This point forward. Click on Line Numbers:

Tick Add line numbering and choose to Restart each page/section and Continuous. Click OK twice to accept – in this dialogue box you also find the options Start at, From text and Count by that are explained above.

Thanks to Katharine O’Moore Klopf for the Word 2003 screen shots and instructions.

Copying and pasting a document with line numbers

It’s come to my attention (thanks to a commenter on this post) that it’s not possible to copy and paste text with line numbers into a new blank document.

This is because the line numbers function actually displays a feature of your document (much like if you turn on paragraph marks) but the line numbers are not a part of the document itself.

If you want to transfer your line numbers into another document, you can do this in one of two ways:

1. Save As the document to make an exact copy (with a different file name) and then add your other text around it
2. Copy and paste your text into a new document and add the line numbers again

At least we know now …

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This article has explained why you might want to add line numbers to your document, and how to do it. If you found this useful, please post a comment, share and like this article! Thank you!

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.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010 and Word 2013 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 article explains how to add and remove hyphenation in a Word document, and how to work with the options you have in the hyphenation menu.

Why would I want to add hyphens to a document?

This issue doesn’t normally come up with standard documents where the text is in a smallish size and extends across the entire width of the page. In fact I hardly ever see it in the work I do, and was only reminded of it when a client had accidentally set automated hyphenation in part of his document that happened to contain long words. Where did all these hyphens come from, I wondered.

It is useful, however, if you are working with columns, say in a table, or for a newsletter you’re publishing, or some other part of a document where you want to have a narrow band of text running down the page. If you just put your text in your column and don’t justify it on the right hand side, you will end up with a very ragged look:

In fact, as you can see (marked by the arrow), one word is just too long for the line and splits at the last letter, something which doesn’t obey any of the standard rules of hyphenation (I bet this has happened in your tables – it has in my clients’).

Maybe we can neaten it up by applying Right Justification …

Oh no! In its effort to make everything tidy, Word has carefully inserted huge spaces between words (unlike someone typesetting properly on a computer or by hand, it doesn’t space out the letters in the words so much as just add massive spaces). And poor old Mr Long Word is still dangling a letter onto the next line.

This looks pretty horrible, doesn’t it. Adding automatic or manual hyphenation is the way forward.

How do I add automatic hyphenation to my Word document?

To work with the hyphenation options, we need to be in the Page Layout tab, and the Page Setup area, and there you’ll find Hyphenation (with a little pop-up box explaining it). This is the case in Word 2007 and Word 2010. In Word 2003, you need to select the following menus: Tools > Language > Hyphenation.

If you click on the arrow to the left of the word Hyphenation, you get a menu that looks like this:

You can choose here between None, Automatic and Manual, and then have some options, too. We’ll look at those options in a moment.

What happens if I add automatic hyphenation to my document?

If you highlight the text and then select Automatic from the Hyphenation menu, Word will automatically insert hyphens into the text to break the words in sensible, permitted places (there is a whole art to this which I will discuss another time. I’m not sure which exact rules Word follows, but a quick look shows that it’s pretty good). So if your text is right justified, you’ll get this:

You can see here that Word has hyphenated all of the longer words that previously caused those big gaps, and made the text an awful lot tidier.

You can do this on unjustified text, too:

but I personally think that this still looks a bit messy.

How do I remove automatic hyphenation?

To remove automatic hyphenation when you find it in a document and don’t want it, highlight the offending text and choose None from the Hyphenation menu in Page Layout > Page Setup:

All of the automatic hyphenation should disappear.

How do I use manual hyphenation in my document?

If you choose the manual hyphenation option, based on where your cursor is placed at the time you select this option, Word will give you a choice of where and whether to hyphenate your words:

(here we can see our unhyphenated text, with the cursor on “demonstrate”). Once you’ve clicked on Yes or No, it will hop along to the next word that’s a candidate for hyphenation.

Why shouldn’t I just hyphenate totally manually?

Of course, you can just look for gaps and manually type a hyphen in the middle of the word, and it will split over two lines. However, this is a concrete character that you’ve inserted into the word, and so if you change the wording in your text so that the offend-ing word no longer comes at the end of the line, you’ll retain the hyphen charac-ter and get artefacts like the ones you can see in this para-graph. Much better to automate the manual process, so to speak …

What are the hyphenation options?

If you click on the Hyphenation Options at the bottom of the Hyphenation dialogue box, you are given a few choices:

Working from the top …

• Automatically hyphenate document – does what it says on the tin
• Hyphenate words in CAPS – you may not want to split long acronyms, etc. – if not, then untick this box
• Hyphenation zone – this is the maximum space allowed between a word and the right hand margin. Increase this number and the hyphenation zone becomes wider – and you will have fewer hyphens. A lower number will give you more hyphens
• Limit consecutive hyphens to – allows you to prevent Word from hyphenating at the end of every line – best adjusted once you’ve set hyphenation and seen what it looks like
• Manual… – gives you another way to get to the Manual Hyphenation feature

——————-

In this article we’ve learned why we might want to apply automatic hyphenation to a document, how we do it, how to remove automatic hyphenation, and the options that are available in the hyphenation menu.

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. Do like and share as much as you can, and/or leave me a comment if this article has been useful to 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 …

We’re already learned the basics of adding page numbers to a Word document, and now we’re going to look at some more things you can do with page numbers, including:

• how to stop your first page displaying a page number
• how to have page numbers in different formats in your document

This will be particularly useful if you’re formatting the page numbers on a PhD or other thesis or dissertation – many of my student clients don’t know how to do this, which is what inspired me to write this series of articles.

How can I have different page number formats in different parts of my document?

Imagine that you’ve written a thesis or a book – something that has a title page (red), a contents list (blue) and then the main body of the text (yellow). It’ll look something like this …

Now imagine that you’d like to have different page numbering for different parts of the document – for example, no page numbering on the title page, Roman numerals for the contents pages, and then the numbering continuing in Arabic numerals for the main body of the text. Look at a non-fction book or someone else’s thesis and you’ll see that this is how they’re often laid out.

How do you do this? First of all, you need to divide your document into discrete sections, using section breaks. Let’s learn how to do that …

How do I see what formatting I have in my document?

If you plan to insert section or other breaks in a document, it’s useful to be able to see what breaks you have in there already. In the document I’m using an example, I would suspect that the aurhor has added some sort of breaks to make the contents page and then main text start on new pages.

How do we check this? Make sure you’re on the Home tab and then press the Paragraph button in the Paragraph section …

Once you’ve pressed the button, you’ll find all sorts of strange marks appear. You can also see that the new page has been started by inserting a Page Break (and not using the Enter key – hooray. If you want to know the reason for the “hooray”, read this article.

The paragraph mark indicates a return, and the Page Break label shows that a page break has been inserted here. That’s great if you just want to start the next chunk of text on the next page, but we want to format each section differently, and this requires a section break rather than just a page break.

How do I insert a section break?

In order to insert a Section Break, we need to delete the page break first. Highlight the page break and press the Delete key or place the cursor just to the right of it and press the Backspace button. As soon as you do that, you’ll notice that the text which sat neatly at the top of the next page has jumped up onto this page. Don’t worry, it will disappear again …

To insert the Section Break, you need to be in the Page Layout tab (not the Insert tab, confusingly). There you will find an area called Page Setup which includes a Breaks menu:

When you press the Breaks button, you’ll see a menu offering several different options for the break you wish to insert – including our old friend the page break and our new friend the section break.

The one we want is Section Break – Next Page. As the text explains, this will insert a Section Break and start the next chunk of text on the next page – exactly what we want to do. Choose that option and hey presto …

… a Section Break (Next Page) appears on your page. And the Contents page has moved back to Page 2.

Note that in this example, we’re dividing the document into three sections, using two section breaks, so we need to add one at the end of the contents list, too …

So now our document is divided into three sections – 1, the title page, 2, the contents list and 3. the main body of the text:

How do I add different formats of numbers to different sections of my document?

Now it’s time to add those page numbers, remembering that we want no page numbers at all on the title page, the Roman numerals on the conents pages followed by Arabic numerals for the rest of the document.

We’ve seen how to add page numbers before, using the Headers and Footers on the document. We’ll do that in a moment. But this time we need to do something else first: we need to remove the association between each section and make tat sure each one is independent. This will allow us to assign different page number formats to each section (and other formatting – I’ll write about this another time, but it’s the way you get your document to let you have certain pages in landscape rather than portrait orientation, etc.

How do I stop my footer having the same format as the previous section?

The trick here is to make sure that the footers do not simply copy the previous section of the document. if they do, you will have trouble making each section different. We now need to go into the second section of the document and disconnect its footers from those of the first section.

So, first of all, go into the Design tab or just left click on the bottom part of your page, below the text. In both cases, the Design tab will display and you need to look at the Navigation area. You will see that the footer automatically decides to be Same as Previous – we need to disconnect this footer from the previous one. Up in the Ribbon, Link to Previous is highlighted, reminding us that this section’s footer is linked to the previous one and providing a handy hint as to how to stop that.

If you press the Link to Previous button it will turn from yellow back to white, you’ll notice that the Link to Previous note in fhe footer has disappeared. This means that you can format Section 2 independently of whatever’s going on in Section 1,

Note that the Header has its own ability to Link to Previous, which is separate from that of the Footer, which means that you can keep any header text you’ve added to the document working throughout the document without needing to re-insert it into each section.

Before we start getting excited about adding those page numbers, make sure you’ve done the same to Section 3, disconnecting it from Section 2. Changing Same as previous in one section won’t have any effect on the next section:

Remind me how to add page numbers …

Now we’re ready to add the page numbers to the document. Ignoring Section 1, which doesn’t need a page number, we can go into the page number add part of Section 2. Just to remind you, that’s on the Page Number area of the Design tab, and in this case we want to add a page number at the bottom of hte page, so we select Page Number then Bottom of Page and the particular position we require, so as to set up the page number position before formatting the actual numbers.

Now it’s time to format the page numbers. So its back to the Page Number button but we choose Format Page Numbers …

You will see on this example that the page number has automatically inserted itself on the first page of the contents (Page 2 of the document), but it has defaulted to being in Arabic numbers and to helpfully inform us that we’re on page 2 of the document. However, we want Roman numerals, AND we want it to start with Page 1. So, into that Page Number format menu, and there we can …

… choose Roman numerals (top) and start at page 2, not page 2. Press OK to set those …

And look – as if by magic, the page number is now i instead of 2.

Now, for section 3, the main body of the text, we want Arabic numerals which continue from the last number in Section 2. So in this case we choose the Number Format to be the default, Arabic, opion, and tick Continue from previous section. In this screenshot, I’ve already pressed OK, so look at the bottom of the page …

and there’s a lovely figure three.

So, to you what weve done in a colourful and dramatic way which is a bit more over the top than what we would actually want our document to look like, we’ve done this:

And while individual institutions’ formatting rules still take precedence, this is what most of my PhD students like their thesis page numbering to look like.

In this article we’ve learned how to add different kinds of page number to different parts of the document, and more complicated formats for page numbers. If you need more of a recap on the basics of page numbering, see the article on that topic.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

If you’re at all interested in my anti-cholesterol diet book which I used as an example in this document, find out more 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.

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 article is going to teach you the basics of adding page numbers to a Word document, using Word 2007 or Word 2010. Later articles in the series will tackle more complicated topics such as mixing Roman and Arabic numerals and making sure your first page doesn’t have a number if you don’t want it to.

Why add page numbers to a Word document?

Good question? You might have a perfectly nice, short document, that looks a bit like this ..

And you don’t really need to add page numbers. But what if it’s going to be a book, or you’re going to introduce a contents page or index? What if people are going to want to quote from it, or refer back to a particular section? Even though if they read your document on their Kindle, they might not be able to see the page numbers, these are all good reasons why you might want to give your readers some page numbers to help them navigate their way through your text.

Where are the menus and buttons for adding page numbers?

As usual, there are a couple of ways to access the menus and buttons you need for adding page numbers. But, again, as usual, they lead to the same place in the end.

Method One involves choosing the Insert tab. Once you’re there, you’ll find a section called Header & Footer, and there’s your Page Numbers button:

Method Two involves clicking with your left mouse button in the blank space at the bottom (or top) of your page. Another way to do this is to select the Design tab, but sometimes that doesn’t show up by default. Clicking on the blank bit of the page will bring up the Headers and Footers and your Page Numbers button:

In Word 2003, you can find the page numbers options in the Header and Footer menu.

Now you’ve found the Page Numbers button, it all stays the same from now on, and its menu looks like this:

We’ll look at how to position your page numbers, and then how to format them (it’s best to do it this order).

How do I choose the position of my page numbers?

You will find two options for positioning your page numbers:

1. At the top or bottom of the page

2. Elsewhere in the page margins

To choose the position of the page numbers in the top or bottom areas of the page, choose Top of Page or Bottom of Page (the positions are identical for the two). Here we choose Top of Page:

You can see lots of options for positioning your page numbers, including that fancy “Page 3 of 12” you’ve seen on other people’s documents. To select the position, click on the example that suits you best (you can scroll down for even more choices).

If you try out Page Margins, you will be given another set of options allowing you to insert your page numbers all over the place:

Again, you can scroll down for even more options.

I find that people have one or two favoured number positions and ignore the others (in much the same way that we only use two programmes on our washing machines). But it’s useful to know how to find all those extra places, in case you’re working collaboratively or with a client who has particular preferences.

Now we’ll look at some basics of formatting your page numbers.

How do I format my page numbers?

This is best done once you’ve decided on the page number position, and you can come back and format them at any time, by finding and clicking on the Page Numbers button. We’re just going to look at the basics here, with more complex choices being discussed next time.

To format the page numbers, find the Page Numbers button and choose Format Page Numbers:

Select Format Page Numbers and you’ll find some more options for changing your page numbers from Arabic to Roman (or Roman capitals) and for where to start the numbering:

If you drop down the Number format list, you’ll find your choices laid out. You are not likely to want to use anything other than straight Arabic numerals (1, 2, 3 …) if you are just using one numbering style for the whole document; the others will come in handy when we learn how to apply different numeral styles to difference sections of the text. But the choices are there:

Again, Chapter numbering and Continue from previous section / Start at are mainly used when you’re applying different numbering styles to different parts of your document (Roman numerals for the contents page and foreword, Arabic for the main text, etc.) but it’s worth knowing where to find these choices for next time.

So, let’s summarise and look at how to apply standard, straightforward page numbering to a document.

How do I apply standard page numbering to my document?

If you just want simple numbers in Arabic numerals at, say, the bottom right hand corner of each page, here’s how you do it.

First, click on the Page Numbers button and choose Bottom of Page, then select the example that best fits where you want your page numbers to appear:

Then, choose Format Page Numbers and make sure your options are set to Arabic numerals 1, 2, 3 … and page numbering to start at 1:

Once you’ve pressed OK, you will be back in the Footer of your document, with the main text still in grey and the page number in black, because you’re in the Footer, not the main text:

Left click on the body of the text, and the page will reverse – the Footer indicator will disappear, your text will be in black and your number will be in grey, because it’s part of the Footer, not of the text:

How do I insert different types of page number into one document?

In this article we’ve learned how to find the Page Numbers button and how to position the page numbers on the page and format them into different kinds of number. In Part 2 of this series, we look at adding different kinds of page number to different parts of the document, and more complicated formats for page numbers.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

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.

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 …

If you are amending a Word document or perhaps working on a document with someone else (a colleague or an editor), it is sometimes useful to be able to highlight some of the text in order to point it out to your collaborator.

Here are three useful ways to highlight text in Word … and one TERRIBLE way that you will never think of using once you’ve read and digested this article.

How to highlight text by changing its colour

This can be useful if you want to mark text you want to change, edit, delete, expand, etc.

Make sure you’re in the Home tab and the Font section. Highlight the text you want to change and click on the Change Text Colour button:

Choose the colour you want your text to be, and click on it. Hey presto:

This can be useful but there is a limited range of colours that are a) legible on a white background and b) sufficiently distinguishable from black. This can be particularly problematic for a reader with a visual impairment or colour blindness.

So you might want to think about using the next option …

How to highlight text using the “highlighter pen”

Just like in real life, you can scribble all over your document using a highlighter pen!. Again, you will find the Highlighter Pen button in the Home tab, Font section, next to the Change Text Colour button. You can use this in two ways:

1. Highlight your text first, then click on the button and choose a colour:

The text you had highlighted will now appear in black with the background colour you selected:

2. Place your cursor anywhere on the page and click the Highlighter Pen button. Your mouse pointer (which usually looks like a capital I unless you’ve changed it) will change to look like a pen. (Unfortunately this does now show up on a screen print. If anyone can find me a copyright-free image of this cursor change, please let me know!)

Left click where you want to start and run the mouse pointer/pen along the text you want to highlight:

The text will become highlighted as you run the pen along. Note, though, that if you use this option, your mouse pointer will keep on acting like a highlighter pen until you click back on the Highlighter Pen button and choose Stop Highlighting:

This is all great if you just want to mark, say, chunks of text that you’ve changed so your editor can see what they need to recheck. But if you need to make any comments on that text, pay very close attention to the two methods coming up and make sure you choose the correct one!

How to highlight and comment on text the CORRECT WAY

If you want to comment on some text, the correct way to do it is this. Highlight the text and in the Review tab, Comments area, click on New Comment:

A comment balloon will appear, and you can type your comment inside the balloon. If your collaborator wants to comment back, they can just add a new comment in a new balloon, and so it goes on.

The joys of using this method are twofold:

1. You can skip through the comments using the Next Comment button and you’ll never miss one.

2. You can delete the comments you’ve dealt with, the highlighting will automatically disappear, and you’ll be left with a nice tidy document.

If you’re working with someone on a document and you want to draw their attention to something and make a comment, this way we’ve just seen is the way to do it.

How to highlight and comment on text the WRONG way

Please, don’t do this. If there’s a lovely, neat way to add comments to a document, which there is (see above), there is no need to write your comments within the text itself, like this:

If you receive a document marked up like this, for each instance of a comment from your collaborator, you’re going to need to change the colour back to normal, delete the comment, or maybe add one of your own. No skipping lightly from comment to comment, but a grim stare at the document to spot the issues.

You can learn more about using Track Changes and Comments in other posts on this blog. Please don’t be tempted to try this method at home!

So, in this article we have learned how to highlight text in three good and one bad way. I hope you’ve found this useful.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

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.

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 …

Are you stuck trying to create additional contents pages for the tables and figures in your document? Read on for simple instructions on how to do this.

We’ve already learned how to apply headings styles and create an automatic table of contents. But what if you’ve got figures and/or tables and you want to show those in the contents pages, too? It can be a bit fiddly, and I’ve partly written this post to give myself a reference document, too.

In this article, we are going to learn the correct and easy way to do this without heartache and hideousness. I’ll devote another article to dealing with something that’s gone wrong …

Why do I need a table of figures?

It’s often useful to provide a list of the figures and tables in your document, especially if it’s a long one, like a dissertation or thesis. They should be separate from the main table of contents, and listed below.

The tricky thing is creating two lists, one of tables and one of figures. This is where people usually come unstuck. Follow these instructions and you should be OK!

How do I create a list of figures and a list of tables?

We’re going to take a few basic steps here. They boil down to:

• Mark all your figures as Figures and all your tables as Tables
• Create a Table of Figures
• Create a Table of Tables

Once you’ve done that, you’ll end up with something like this:

How to apply captions to tables and figures

I know what you’ve done … you’ve inserted your figure or table then typed its caption underneath, haven’t you? Like everyone else in the world. But let’s make life easier for you.

It doesn’t matter if you’ve already typed in all the caption names just as straight text – let’s do this the proper way and we can move those typed captions into the correct place as we go!

Click on the References tab. Find the Captions section. Put your cursor where you want the caption to go (arrow), Click on the Insert Caption button.

Let’s start off with a table caption. Remember, we want to mark a difference between tables and figures so that Word can create automatic lists.

Don’t worry if you’ve already got caption text in there at the moment: do this on a new line. We can tidy things up afterwards. You might want to copy your caption text so it’s available to paste.

You can see a drop down list which says Figure at the moment. But we want to differentiate between figures and tables, so click on the arrow on the right to drop down the list.

… and choose Table. Once you’ve clicked, the Caption section above it will also change to read Table 1.

Now you can type the caption text straight into this box.

If you’ve copied the caption text you had previously entered, you can use Control-V to paste it into this box. Note: right-click and paste won’t work here, but Control-V will work.

If you haven’t copied the caption text, and you haven’t typed it in the box, don’t worry, as you will have another opportunity to insert it in a moment. Press the OK button and Table 1 and any text you’ve entered will appear below your table.

Now we’re going to add a figure caption.

Put your cursor below the figure and click on the same Insert Caption button. This time, choose Figure rather than Table:

This time, just leave the Caption box blank apart from the words Figure 1.

Now you can type the caption text in here, or even paste it in – just make sure it goes blue like the words Figure 1 (we can change that later) to ensure it’s all included as part of the caption.

Now you can go through and mark all of your figure and table captions using this method.

Modifying and formatting caption numbering etc.

You can modify your captions, especially their numbering. When you’re adding a caption, click the Numbering button.

You will now get options for changing the numbering from 1, 2, 3 to a, b, c, etc.

Use the drop down arrow to pick what you want.

You can also link the numbering to your chapter numbering – so you have Figures 1-1, 1-2, 2-1, 2-2 etc. (this is particularly useful in a long and complex document where you’re referring to lots of figures, as it saves the numbering going odd if you move figures around). To do this, click the “Include chapter number” tick box then specify what you count as a chapter number (you will need to have numbered headings to make this work):

Creating a table of figures and a table of tables

Once you’ve labelled all of your captions correctly as I’ve shown you, you can create your table of figures and table of tables.

Let’s do the table of figures first (it doesn’t matter which order you do this in).

Create a blank page where you want your table of figures to go, or click just below your Table of Contents if you’ve already created that.

Staying on the Reference tab, click on Insert Table of Figures:

You will now get some options, and this is where we choose whether we want the figures or tables to be listed. We’re adding the figures first:

Note, Table will be the default option. Choose Figure by dropping down the menu using the arrow on the right. Table will be highlighted in blue so click on Figure. As if by magic …

A table of figures!

Now return down a couple of spaces in your document and do the same to insert a Table of Tables:

Make sure it’s on Table and click OK. Hey presto …

Customising your table of figures

You can customise your table of figures in the same way that you can customise a Table of Contents, choosing from a range of styles and specifying how they are laid out:

I’m going to write an article about this soon, so for now just note that you can choose different “looks” for the list, and you will get a preview in the pane above these drop-down menu sections.

Adding headings to the table of figures and table of tables

You will probably want to add headings to your tables. Remember to mark these as Heading 1 so they appear in your automated Table of Contents, which I’ve also added here:

Updating your table of figures and table of tables

If you change anything in the page numbering, document layout or captions themselves (particularly useful if you or your proofreader finds an error) or delete or insert tables and figures, you will need to update your table of figures / tables.

You do this in exactly the same way as updating a table of contents. Right-click on the table, making sure the grey highlighting shows up. Then select Update Field and then Update Entire Table.

And that’s it.

We’ve created captions the correct way, and created tables of figures and tables of tables, done some customisation and learned how to update them.

If you have found this article useful, please share it using the buttons below, and leave me a comment!

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.

Please note, these hints work with versions of Microsoft Word currently in use – Word 2003, Word 2007, Word 2010, Word 2013 and Word 2016 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 …

Related articles on this blog

How do you create a two-line figure caption and a one-line entry in the table of figures?

How to create a Table of Contents

How to update your Table of Contents, Table of Tables or Table of Figures

Editing and the Table of Contents