Posts under the ‘MS Office’ category

Creating high quality images and embedding all fonts are two requirements of creating a thesis or dissertation.  These two requirements will ensure that your document is presented at the highest quality and that the document appears the same on any computer, regardless of the fonts that are available.  This tutorial will show how to check and select the conversion settings in Word to make sure your document meets the requirements.

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Having bookmarks that replicate the table of contents (TOC) – and include the TOC – is one requirement of the procedures to submit a thesis or dissertation.  Bookmarks allow the reader to see a TOC wherever they are in the document, and navigate easily to that section of the document.  This tutorial will show you how to create bookmarks using Word and Adobe Acrobat on the PC.

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Having a table of contents (TOC) with hyperlinks is one requirement of the procedures to submit a thesis or dissertation.  Hyperlinks allow a reader to click on any part of your table of contents and navigate directly to that page.  This tutorial will show you how to create a hyperlinked table of contents using Word and Adobe Acrobat on the PC.

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In our previous posts, we’ve shown how to apply, edit, and create styles.  This tutorial will show you how to display the styles used in your document in draft and outline view.  This can help you easily troubleshoot why incorrect items are appearing in your table of contents, for example.

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Word 2007 introduced a new “feature” that compresses your images to 220ppi after saving.  This saves file space for your documents, but images at this resolution do not meet Graduate School requirements for printing.  This tutorial will show you how to turn off this feature in Word 2007 for a single document.  Word 2010 users should see the Microsoft web page for instructions.

We recommend doing all image editing in a program dedicated to that purpose, such as Photoshop, before inserting images into your Word document.  Images must be at least 300ppi unless they are screenshots.  Screenshots are only allowed when absolutely necessary to convey the information.  All images must also be clear and readable.  Increasing the resolution of a low resolution image to 300ppi will not be acceptable.

First, click on the image and then ribbon so that the “Picture Tools…Format” portion of the ribbon is visible (circled below).

Click on image and select the "Picture Tools - Format" portion of the ribbon.

When the built in styles don’t meet your needs for formatting paragraphs in Word, you will need to create your own styles.  In this example, I will create a style for my paragraphs that contain equations.

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Styles apply a common set of formatting to a paragraph within Word.  In a previous post, we showed how to apply a style to a paragraph.  This tutorial will show two ways to edit an existing style.

First, edit the text as you desire.  In the example below, I have edited the text “Introduction” to be a different font (Adobe Garamond Pro Bold) and size (24 point) than the original Heading 1 style.  We can tell Heading 1 is applied to this text because it is outlined in orange in the Style section of the ribbon.

Edit the text to meet your specifications.

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Styles in Word are used to format text consistently throughout your document. Each paragraph may have a single style applied to it.  For each paragraph, styles define the:

• Appearance of the text (bold, bulleted, size, font, etc.)
• Behavior of the paragraph (does it stay with the next paragraph?  Have a page break before it?)
• Structure of the document (is this a heading meant for the table of contents?)

Styles are found on the Home tab of Word, in the Styles section (boxed in the figure below).

The Styles section on the Home tab contains all of the built in styles available for use.

Tabs can be used to align text in a document.  This is very useful for lining up the numbers in the table of contents, equations in the body of the document, or lining up lists of items.  Spaces should never be used to line up items, since each character in a font is a different width.  Precise alignment of items is only possible with a tab.

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When formatting your document, you might want to see hidden characters such as:

• A space
• Paragraph marker
• Tab marker
• Section break
• Page break

To toggle which items are displayed, go to the paragraph section on the home tab:

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