Dissertations Deadline

If you're in your third year, it's likely you're nearing your dissertation deadline. The last thing you're
going to want to do is spend a long time formatting your very long document when you need to be
concentrating on getting the content right. The good news is, if you're using Microsoft Office Word
to produce your dissertation, you don't have to. Word has built in features that will allow you to
format the bulk of your document quickly.

Create an Automatic Table of Contents

Creating an automatic Table of Contents is easy peasy! All you need to remember is that Word
needs to 'know' what should appear in your table of contents. To do this, you simply mark the text
you want to appear in your table of contents as: 'Heading 1' for main headings, 'Heading 2' for sub
headings and 'Heading 3' for sub-sub headings.
How do you mark it? Select the text, then using Styles (on the Home ribbon) apply either Heading 1,
Heading 2 or Heading 3
Once your whole document has had headings applied, select the References ribbon and click on the
Table of Contents button. Choose Automatic Table 2 and hey presto, as if by magic, your table of
contents will appear.
The best thing is, even if you then go back and edit the document, with a click of a button (or 2) you
can update your table of contents to reflect any changes you've made: right-click on the table of
contents youve just created, then select Update Field from the shortcut menu. You can choose to
update the whole table or just the page numbers depending on what you've edited.
If you'd like to see a demonstration have a look at our Inserting a Table of Contents video on
YouTube.

Advanced page numbering

Your table of contents will need to list the entire contents of your dissertation including sections
such as Abstract, Acknowledgements and Table of figures; but, these pages appear before page 1
(which indicates the beginning of the main body of your dissertation such as the introduction). The
pages before page 1 are normally numbered using lower case Roman numerals (i, ii, iii etc.). In order
to have 2 different page numbering formats, you need to insert a section break into your document
and apply the different numbering formats to the difference sections. This isn't quite so straight
forward, so watch our Advanced page numbering CSTsnippets video to see how it is achieved.

Use Styles to format your document

The easiest way to ensure your dissertation is consistently formatted all the way through is to use
styles in your document. If you need to change the way your document looks, don't use the
formatting tools available in the Font and Paragraph groups on the Home ribbon, use the Quick
Styles located in the Styles group instead.

By modifying the style itself you will update the entire document according to the changes you make
to the style. This is extremely powerful and will save you masses of time.
We are scheduling several Format your assignment workshops in the next few weeks so come and
join us if you would like to learn how to use styles. As always, you can also access workshop learning
materials from BREO so if you can't get to our workshops but would like to learn how to use styles
have a look in our Computer Skills Training BREO pages.

Book an appointment
If you're really stuck, remember you can book a one to one appointment with a trainer to go through
all of the above with you.

Word Tips:
If you have heading styles applied to your document, you can navigate through your document
quickly by using the Document Map located in the View ribbon.

Normally a Table of Contents appears on its own page but, however tempting it is to press the
Enter/Return key until you get a new page, do not do this! The quickest way to create a new page is
to use the keyboard shortcut:
Ctrl + Enter

There are several ways to hide and show the ribbon, so if you want more screen space to work with,
or you've lost the ribbon and want to get it back, try one of the following:
Click on the down arrow at the end of the Quick Access Toolbar, then tick (or untick) Minimize the
Ribbon
Right-click any button or group name on the ribbon, then select Minimize the Ribbon
Double-click any of the tabs to toggle the ribbon on and off
Use the keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + F1 to toggle the ribbon on and off

If you have a Microsoft IntelliMouse (mouse with a wheel), hold down the Ctrl key as you rotate the
wheel forward to zoom in and backward to zoom out. This will work in most applications,
particularly in MS Office applications (Word, Excel and PowerPoint)

Press Alt + Shift + D to insert today's date into a Microsoft Word document

Switch between open documents by pressing Ctrl + F6 on your keyboard.