A Word document has to look good. Presentation is after all a major part of any project. There is no point in putting so much effort into the research, and then making a mess of the presentation with the result that the supervisors are unimpressed with the work that the student has put in. That is why once the words have been put down on the document, the next step is to make sure that the document looks presentable and professional.
In this regard, the Table of Contents is an important aspect that the students will have to take care of. The first place that the eyes of whoever is reading the documents will go to is the Table of Contents. This part will have to be neat, informative, and professional. How is that achieved?
MS Word makes life easy for the writers by providing them with several options in terms of style and format for making the Table of Contents. The best part about all these in-built options is that the table can also be made quickly. Let us assume that the student is working on a project which has to be completed within a short period and he does not have much time. He needs to prepare a Table of Contents quickly. He cannot afford to painfully format and create every aspect of the Table of Contents himself. He will need some help. This is where the automatic options come in useful. The maker of the document simply has to choose one of the options that he has been given. The options for the Table of Contents can be found in the References section.
In the Home tab, there are many style options given, and the maker can use these documents to modify and customize his Table of Contents. It is also possible to automatically update the Table of Contents as and when more material is added to the document.
It is important that the student start making the Table of Contents from the very beginning of the project. There are many projects where the content runs into thousands and thousands of pages. After a while the writer himself loses track of which section is supposed to go where. If he were to start making the Table of Contents when all the writing has been done then he will find it to be an impossible task. That is why he should keep updating it as and when he is adding new material.
While there are many styles given for making the table, and there is also some customizing that can be done by the writer himself, it is important to choose a style that suits the audience of the content. It will not do to make a fancy table for material that is serious and has been written for a serious audience. In case some guidance is needed, then it is possible to look through the Tables created on other documents and see what kind of styles have been used.
Over the course of academic life, students will have to prepare many projects. The demand from many of the universities is that the students write these projects on an MS Word document. Many students find it easy enough to write the words down on the document. But then they are faced with the difficult task of formatting. It is then that they realise that their skills are rather limited in this regard.
But they need not worry. Yes, there are many books that they can get from a good library that will tell them what they need to do to achieve good formatting styles. But there are many students that do not have access to a library. So what can they do? They should log on to the Internet, and then browse through an informative website that will tell them exactly how they can format a Word document using some easily implementable tips. Many students find the task of formatting a Word document quite frustrating. There are so many delicate intricacies that it can become quite time-consuming to get all of it correct and just the way one wants it.
The best way to master formatting is to recognize that Word looks at text differently from the way people look at it. For people text is made up of sentences that lead into paragraphs that then form pages and subsequently lead into chapters and so on. But that is not how the tool looks at it. The tool recognizes sections, paragraphs and characters. So when you are formatting a page, you are effectively formatting one of these three levels.
The trick is to look at the document the way the tool looks at it. If one were to go to the paragraph section of the Home tab of the document, then a button can be found that says Show/Hide. If this button were to be pressed then a number of marks will appear on the page that tells the reader how the tool is looking at the text that has been written. These marks are nothing more than the hidden characters that the tool is using to format the document.
Many people might not know this, but paragraph marks, spaces and tabs are all treated like characters in this tool. That is why during formatting many people get it wrong. If the writer were to treat these symbols like characters just the way the tool does then they will find that the formatting becomes a lot easier, and they have more control over their document.
It is very distracting working with these additional marks on the screen, which is why many writers do not use this option even when they know, how to use it. But it is still possible to use some of the marks. For this one simply needs to go to the Display section under Options in the File menu, and then choose which characters they want displayed on screen, and which ones they do not.
Mike Cornell and Emma Jones are behind the success of Elearning Blog, a blog solely focused on providing free resources and tips for e-learning.