As a student, in our academic career, we inevitably have to use typesetting tools to compile a report or paper. An intuitive and clear paper will undoubtedly please our teachers, while a logically confusing and untyped article will greatly reduce the academic effect of our research results.
Neat typesetting will make the article clear and readable
Everyone knows that if we want to choose a convenient and excellent typesetting tool, Microsoft Word must be our first choice. So what content does a qualified paper or report need to contain? How can I use Word to format a beautiful, concise and logically clear article? Below I will introduce some tips for efficiently formatting article reports using Word.
Note : The operating environment below is Microsoft Word in Windows Office 365 version 1904. The actual operating interface may be different from your own machine, but the principle is the same.
Basic framework
First of all, an excellent paper or report should at least contain the following content:
- Cover: Contains the title of the paper, author information, etc.
- Table of contents: Outline of the article
- Text:
- First-level title
- Second-level title
- Article content
- ...
- Endnotes , Reference: Notes, notes or quotations
Cover page
Although it is possible that in many cases, for a report, a title plus a subtitle can directly solve the problem. But a separate cover will make the layout of the entire paper more formal and make the main point of the paper more distinct. Word has a default cover format, which can be opened in "Menu Bar → Insert → Cover".
Insert the preset cover
Of course, there will definitely be cases where the preset cover does not conform to the rigorous overall design of our academic report. When we find that it is too troublesome to directly modify the style of the Word preset template manually, we actually You can create a custom cover by combining tables, text boxes, and other components.
Below is a typical cover example. A clear paper cover should contain at least three elements: report title, personal information and writing date . The title can be formatted using text boxes, but I recommend using a table for personal information and writing date.
We can use the horizontal text box to fix the title of the paper at any position on the cover page. Generally, the upper 1/3 of the entire page is used as the standard. Pin personal information, instructor, writing date and other information at the bottom of the page. In the picture above, I used to create an information module in the form of a text box nested within a borderless table. This not only makes it easy to fix the position of the module, but also ensures that the information inside the module is neat.
uses tables to format information into sections. It is very convenient. We can use tables to ensure the neatness of internal text layout, without having to manually use active formats such as spaces and tabs to tidy up. By hiding the table's borders, we can make a single module neat and consistent.
Achieve a neat effect by hiding the borders of the table
At the same time, we can call up "Drawing Tools → Format" by clicking on any picture, text box and other elements, and then select "Use Alignment" under the "Alignment" tab guideline " to help us center the title text box.
Alignment reference line
Table of contents
An article cannot be without an outline, and a paper cannot be without a table of contents. Word can automatically generate a table of contents for us. At "Reference → Table of Contents", we can directly select a default table of contents. Here I recommend using "Automatic Table of Contents" directly, so that in the subsequent settings, we can use to use styles to set the first-level title, second-level title, etc. to automatically update the table of contents and corresponding page numbers to achieve automatic table of contents loading and updating. . For details here, please see the introduction in the next section "Titles and Texts at Each Level".
When inserting the directory
, please note that the directory itself is also a paragraph of text, so we can directly select the entire directory, and then select to define the paragraph style to customize the line spacing, font size and other styles of the directory itself. You can also choose to modify the "Table of Contents" title style to match our headings below.
Directly modify the format of the table of contents
Headings and text at all levels
Finally, we have arrived at the text of our paper. A paper with clear paragraphs and clear logic is most impressive. Therefore, in addition to making an outline before writing the paper, we can also use titles to reflect the various parts and modules of the paper report. The style of
Word directly helps us define titles at all levels such as text, title 1, title 2, etc., and there are also other style options for us to use directly. But many times, when we write articles, we ignore these preset styles and adjust them one by one. This is not only time-consuming and labor-intensive, but also fails to let Word know the paragraph outline of our article.
Word's built-in style preset
We can declare a title by directly placing the cursor on a certain title row and selecting a certain level of title style. After such a configuration, not only can we directly modify the style of a certain level of headings, can also make the function of Word automatically generating and updating the table of contents mentioned above take effect . At the same time, we can also use this method to unify the style of the entire document's internal text, including fonts, font sizes, paragraph formats, etc. Please see "Global Format Settings" below for this part.
Endnotes and References
At the end of the article, when we use Word to mark the endnotes, it is usually to write clear comments or indicate references. Word provides us with the function of directly inserting and maintaining endnote modules in "Quote → Insert Endnote".
Insert endnotes
During use, we can directly select "Insert Endnotes" somewhere above where we need to comment, and Word will automatically maintain the endnote list for us at the end of the document and make appropriate adjustments. Hyperlinks are very convenient.
global format setting
So far, we have basically realized the skeleton of an excellent paper. Next, with appropriate polishing, we can make our paper neat and beautiful.
The default application of Word style
In the above, I mentioned that Word can provide us with global style settings, so that we do not need to write a natural paragraph and update the style once. In and in "Start → Style", we can directly modify the format of a module, create a style, apply styles to a certain part of the text, etc.
Customize the preset format of a certain style
Here is also the method I mentioned using "style" to unify the format of the text of our entire article. Word will recognize non-titles (or undefined text) as "body" by default, so that we can make the format of the entire article consistent by modifying the "body" format.
It is worth mentioning that if there are no given font or style requirements, I recommend replacing the default Songti that comes with the system with " Siyuan Songti ", more specifically: Source Han Serif. The open source font family "Siyuan Songti" released by Google and Adobe is much better than the system default Songti in terms of display and rendering effects on various devices, as well as the effects of exporting to PDF or printing directly to paper publications.
SiYuan SongTi
SiYuan SongTi covers almost all Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and other CJK font symbols, and of course also includes English characters, so using SiYuan SongTi will greatly make your entire article beautiful.
Captions of figures and tables
Although it is said that the connotation and viewpoint of a paper determine its academic value, a paper without pictures and charts is not only dry and lacking in content, but also difficult to understand.Attach appropriate pictures and charts to your article, and use line charts, pie charts, etc. for visual data display, which will make your article more readable.
In order to have a clear format and conveniently point to a certain drawing or table, we usually add "titles" to the drawings and tables, such as: Figure 1, Table 3, Figure 6-4, etc. However, we often add a separate line of text directly below the picture, center it, reduce the font size, and change it to italics as the caption of our picture. Not only is this method ineffective in labeling pictures and charts, but sometimes the caption of a picture is on the next page of the picture due to text reasons.
Word has actually prepared a way for us to add captions. We can directly select a picture, a table or a chart, right-click and select "Insert Caption" from the menu item.
Insert captions for pictures and charts
The caption settings in Word are also playable. What I introduce here is not all, but in this article, the captions and chart directories in Word can be automatically introduced in detail. Recommended for everyone to read.
Summary
This is the basic introduction to some tips for using Word to simply format papers and reports. Although these operations seem very basic, they can really give your papers and reports a clear and beautiful shell. Of course, the operations of Word are not limited to what I have introduced. As a tool that each of us in the Office family will be exposed to, Word has more and deeper skills worth exploring. I hope that after reading this article, our typesetting level can be improved on the basis of "only using spaces and tab alignment". Thanks for reading.
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