MASTERING THE MICROSOFT WORD USAGE EPISODE #1

tolustx (64)in #writing • 7 years ago (edited)

Gone are the days when for every word processing task anyone had to do, he/she would look for a company secretary or visit a Business Centre to get it done. Computers were majorly desktops, which are not portable and always depend on power supply. Now, with laptop computers very popular and affordable for many people, individuals tend to do their word processing jobs themselves. This do-it-yourself however reflects a lot of unprofessionalism as most people just make improvisations when they do not know what tool exactly to use for a particular task. This is particularly evident in students' reports and research thesis.

I will be writing a couple of articles (a series) on the understanding and implementing Microsoft Word tools to produce professional-looking reports and write-ups. In this first episode, I will be treating how to automatically generate your Table of Contents.

When unprofessional users type their table of contents, they struggle with typing, arrangement, alignment, etc. At the end of this post, you will be able to produce if perfect, a near-perfect Table of Contents.

Styles

The Home tab of the Ms Word toolbar allows you to set the form or style in which you want your texts to appear. This is done by choosing or setting the format in which you want each title, paragraph or sentence to appear.

The Ms Word Main Taskbar

Some of the functions to be set are font style, font size, line spacing, font colour, and text alignment. For example, the Normal style could be used for continuous writing and set at 12 Font size, Arial font style, 1.5 line spacing, etc. To set these entries, right-click on the normal style and choose modify. On this window, you can make the changes you desire and click on Ok

The Styles Modify Window

Headings

Since entries in your table of contents will be topics and subtopics of your document, you will need to set styles for your headings in the same section. The features of headings like UPPER CASE, bold, underline, alignment, etc. can be assigned for all headings in the same category.

Heading 1 would be the main titles, e.g. CHAPTER TWO
Heading 2 would be main topics in each chapter, e.g. LITERATURE REVIEW
Heading 3 would be the sub topics of each topic. e.g.
2.1 History of the Igbos
2.2 Tribes among the Igbos

It is important to note that before all these formatting, I recommend that you complete your typing first of all. When this is done you can now start formatting by selecting the texts that fall under each category of heading. For every part of your text that falls under Heading 1, highlight it and click on Heading 1 in the style list. Do same for other headings too.

CHAPTER TWO

LITERATURE REVIEW

2.1 History of the Igbos

2.2 Tribes among the Igbos

When this formatting is complete for the whole document (article or report), then you are ready to generate your table of content. Follow the steps below to generate the table automatically.

Move your cursor to the point where you wish to place your table of contents
On the main toolbar, click on References
On the top left corner, Click on Table of Contents ᵥ
Choose the format your prefer, i.e. Automatic Table 1, Automatic Table 2, or Manual Table and click on it.

Table of contents generated

The table of content is generated automatically with all texts indicated in the main document.
If after generating this table you make any changes to the document, like changes that alters page numbering, or you just inserted new headings somewhere in the document, simply Click on the Update Table, marked U in the picture above.

This is a simple, precise and easy way to generate your Table of Contents.