So i'm not going to write a review on Word and how great it is for typing things like letters, CVs etc. Instead i'm going to look at its uses within academia. More precisely i'm going to look at its functions that are useful when creating an academic document. Then again, there are even so many of these that it would take an entire blog dedicated to it to cover them all, so i'll select References and Figures lists for this post.
Referencing
Referencing, also known as the bane of an undergraduate's life, is one of the most important components of any academic work. May students (myself included) spend 3 years of their life developing an extreme distaste for referencing, even to the point of going through the 5 stages of grief:- Denial - "I don't actually need references, that's just for English Lit. students".
- Anger - "I hate the Harvard system, it's so pointless and complex, I can't see why it's even needed".
- Bargaining - "Why can't I use a different method of referencing? The one with the numbers is much better"
- Depression - "I hate my life, I want to be done with this assignment but i've got about 5 days of referencing to go".
- Acceptance - "I guess it serves a purpose, I suppose i'll just get on with it".
Throughout my undergraduate degree I strived to find a hack to speed up the whole referencing process. We'd obviously been taught how to use the Harvard system properly, with a whole thick handout on how to reference every type of document within the Harvard style. This all seemed far to complex so I searched through the internet to find something to make it easier, or that would do it for me. I remember for the first 2 years I was using A reference generator from Niel's Toolbox
(Neil's Toolbox, 2015), but the method involved filling in the information into a series of boxes, which would then be converted into the text i could paste into my essay. An issue I always had with this was that I would need to reformat the text afterwards, meaning that it didn't actually save me any time. Next I discovered HarvardGenerator.com (Harvard Referencing Generator, 2015) which created it for me from a simple web-link or ISBN number (Incidentally, I used this to create the references for this blog). This made things go a lot quicker, but still left me with formatting issues. It wasn't until my final project of my 3rd year that I discovered the way of doing it within Word, and i've never looked back.
To begin referencing within Word, head to the Document Elements tab
Which will bring up this section on the right end of the toolbar
There's a dropdown box to pick your referencing style - All of the major ones are in there, or you can create your own. The other two parts are to insert the Bibliography section or add a new reference with the Manage section. Clicking the Bibliography button will bring up this menu
Both of these options create a table in the document that can be updated to contain all the works referenced within the file. I always go for the bibliography one. Clicking the Manage button brings up this box:
The one pictured is taken from an essay i'm currently working on, so it already has some sources within it. To add a new one click the + icon at the bottom. Double clicking on one of the listed documents will add an in-text reference to it, which makes it really easy to reference something multiple times.
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| I've highlighted the additions that double clicking makes to the document. |
When you add a new reference, you'll be presented with a box like this:
The drop-down menu at the top lets you pick which type of document you're referencing, which then gives you different options to add. Handily, Word puts a little asterisk next to the most important things to add, so you can easily fill in all the required information.
Here's a screenshot of what the references section at the end of the document will then look like:
Figures
Similar to how the referencing system works, Word also has a Table of Figures function. For those unfamiliar with figures, it's basically a was of labelling an image within a document so it's easier to refer to it in the text. Instead of "as you can see in the image above" you can say "as you can see in Figure 4". You can also use this figure section to insert your referencing and a caption on the image, such as in the image below... or figure 4 ;)
This whole Figure process is rather straightforward. Once an image had been inserted, right click the image and select insert caption:
Which then brings up this menu:
You'll notice that the caption already says Figure 1 in it. This will change depending on how many figures come before it in the document. As an added bonus, Word will also automatically update these numbers if you insert another figure between other figures, so they will always be in numerical order. How handy! Simple add your caption and referencing into this box and hit OK.
After you've inserted a number of images, you're going to want to draw up a list of where these figures are located within the document. This is done in a similar fashion to the Bibliography table, but it is located elsewhere:
After you click this menu, you'll be presented with this option box:
Clicking the Table of Figures tab will allow you to choose your formatting options for the table before hitting OK. Once that's done, you'll get one of these lovely tables:
With a bit of practice the entire process of referencing and figures becomes second nature and you can forget about all the hard work and simply remind Word that you want it to do something for you. Word will become more than just a tool for writing, it'll become your writing assistant!
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