Holdfast Training Services Trial Blog

In an attempt to get back on subject and make my blog sound less like an internal monologue that has spilled out into the public realm.

As DII (at least the last time I looked) is stuck in the Office dark ages I don’t think many will have really used some of this stuff, but you RSME issued computers, your work computers and probably any personal copies of Office are probably more up to date so this might be useful.

The ‘References’ tab on current versions of Word seems to be particularly useful and I wish I’d found it earlier. 

References.  I’ve been playing with it recently and it allows you to enter your references in a central location and then cite them in the main body of the document with a simple click of the mouse and seemingly to Havard standards!  It will then auto-generate a references list wherever you want to put it in the document in the correct format.

Captions.  Using the ‘Insert Caption’ function you can tell Word whether you’re annotating a Figure or a Table and it will auto number them, removing the problem of manually re-numbering if you decide to add another photo at the beginning of the document.  Word will then auto-generate a list of Figures and Tables for you and give it the correct page number.

Cross-referencing.  Should you need to refer to Figure X in your main body of the document you can do this using the ‘Cross-reference’ option it works for paragraphs too, it will then know to look in the right place.  I don’t think this auto-updates BUT when it comes to finishing the document it seems that you can just right click on the entry in the main body and ‘update field’ it will then refresh the para or figure number for you.

I don’t know if I’ve just been a member of the slow reading class here and you’re all well aware of this or if everyone else has wasted time cross-referencing documents and manually generating contents list.  If it’s the latter then hopefully this will make life easier for you all.