Working with large documents

Word has some features that can make your life easier when working with large documents. By "large document" I mean something like a book or a term paper. An example of a large document is this Sherlock Holmes document.

Comments

Note that this document has a comment at the beginning. Comments are useful when you are passing a document around for several people to review.

To add a comment: "Insert" | "Comment"

To print comments: "File" | "Print Preview"

The "Print Preview" toolbar will appear:

In the drop-down box at the left, choose "Final Showing Markup"

To print the document without the comments:

In "Print Preview", in the drop-down box at the left, choose "Final"

Finding things

It may be difficult to find some specific text in a large document simply by scrolling.

· To find specific text in a document (and perhaps replace it with something else):
From the menu: "Edit" | "Find"
From the keyboard: Ctrl+F)Find and Replace can also be used to find and replace text that is formatted in a particular way (e.g. bold), and non-printing elements (e.g. paragraph marks, page breaks, etc.)

· To locate specific elements (not text) in a document (e.g. page number, section number, etc.):
From the menu: "Edit" | "Go to"
From the keyboard: Ctrl+G

Headers and footers

· A header appears at the top of every page. A footer appears at the bottom of every page.
From the menu: "View" | "Header and Footer"
The Header and Footer toolbar will appear:

· Insert page numbers. This command can be used if you want to make the first page different from the rest (e.g. a title page).
From the menu: "Insert" | "Page Numbers"

Footnotes and endnotes

A term paper requires footnotes/endnotes. Word makes the process easy.

· Insert footnotes and endnotes
From the menu: "Insert" | "Reference" | "Footnote"

The following commands are especially useful if you are creating a book. However, the Document Map feature, the Table of Contents feature, and the Index feature will only work if you have been using styles as you created your document.

Styles

· Changing the formatting in a large document can be very time consuming. A solution to this is to use Word's styles feature. A style is a name that has been given to a collection of formatting attributes. From the menu: "Format" | "Styles and formatting…"
Sample document: Sherlock Holmes

Document map

· View a "map" of your document:
Click on the Document Map button on the standard toolbar to divide the screen into two panes. The left pane will show the headings and the right pane will show the text.

Table of contents

· Create a table of contents.
From the menu: "Insert" | "Index and Tables" | "Table of Contents"

Index

· Flag the words that are to go in the index:
Select each word that you want to appear in the index by selecting it and typing Alt+Shift+X (for indeX)

· Have Word automatically create an index:
From the menu: "Insert" | "Index and Tables" | "Index"

Updated 2007.03.15