Have you ever had to edit a document that has kilometres in one sentence and miles in the next, or kilogrammes in one recipe and pounds in another -- and muttered to yourself about having to look up the conversion rate and then get out your calculator to find the...
Question I’m desperate for advice on a 400+ PhD that is terribly unstable. The paragraph settings won’t work, table of contents won’t update, numbering system won’t stick – all sorts of trouble. Answer I've had similar problems, and can suggest a few things: Final...
Nearly every book requires a table of contents (TOC) and so do many documents. Word allows you to create a TOC automatically, as long as you have previously applied heading styles or outline levels to all the headings you want to include in the TOC. Start by creating...
Formal documents need a List of Figures and a List of Tables, in which the captions are exactly the same as the captions in the text and the page numbers are accurate, It is very difficult and time consuming to create these lists manually but Microsoft Word can create...
Publishers and institutions usually require front matter of their books or documents to have Roman page numbers {i, ii, iii) and the main body to have Arabic page numbers that start at 1. This formatting tip tells you how to achieve that. Numbering in the front matter...
Clients have usually started creating their document with a Word version that did not have themes or they have manually applied their institution's required font, ie Times New Roman or Arial. You therefore need to change the default heading font and body font to match...
Go to the title page. In the Layout tab > Page Setup group (far left), select the dialog box launcher (the arrow pointing diagonally down-right in the bottom right corner). The Page Setup dialog box pops up. In the margin tab, the margins are usually either 2,54 cm...
Press F12. The Save As dialog box pops up. In the dark area at the bottom, on the left, you will see the File Name label. In the textbox, enter a name for your template. Below the File Name is the File Type. Select 'Word template (*.dotx)'. The folder changes to the...
The benefits of formatting to editors Formatting “makes it much easier for me to work with the document, it looks professional, and it is much easier for the examiners to navigate” (Richard Steele, in a PEGblog about his take on academic referencing). Many...
It's sometimes hard to decide how to treat cross-references and field names in running text, like instructions for using a program. Should they be in quotation marks, bolded, italicised, in a different colour or in another font? There is no hard and fast rule. It's...
“This is a sentence.” “This is a sentence with a dialogue tag at the end,” she said. “This,” he said, “is a sentence split by a dialogue tag.” “This is a sentence,” she said. “This is a new sentence. New sentences are capitalized.” “This is a sentence followed by an...
Often the DOIs and URLs in a reference list create large, ugly gaps (especially if the list is justified) because they do not break nicely. The Online Chicago Manual of Style (17th edition - login required) recommends breaking long URLs: • ‘After a colon or a double...
Question: I'm editing a document with many headings and sub-headings, only some of which have been taken up in the automatically created Table of Contents. How do I apply or remove the formatting that determines whether or not a heading is included in the automatic...
(The instructions are intended as guidelines and apply to Microsoft® Word for Microsoft 365 MSO (Version 2403 Build 16.0.17425.20124 64-bit) for Windows 11. Details may differ slightly for other versions.) In my first blog post, I shared my 14-step formatting...
Formatting makes it much easier for me to work with the document, it looks professional, and it is much easier for the examiners to navigate (Richard Steele, 2023). In my last blog, I shared my 14-step formatting checklist and how to work through steps 1 to 6: Open...
Richard Steele said in his recent blog about his take on academic referencing: Formatting “makes it much easier for me to work with the document, it looks professional, and it is much easier for the examiners to navigate … this is a technical issue, not an academic...
