Formatting a Report with Word 2010 The basics Although you can use Word to do a great many formatting tasks, here we will concentrate on the basic requirements for good presentation of a report. These include: Margins Line spacing Page numbers Headers and footers Using heading styles Outline numbering Bullets and numbering Table of contents Tables Page breaks Sections Title page Margins The margins are the amount of white space around the edges of the text you type. There is a default margin size, but you can alter it if you wish. You might be required to set your margins to a particular size for an assignment. Pages in a Word document have an orientation, which can be either Portrait or Landscape. Portrait orientation has the page upright, and landscape has the page on its side. Documents default to portrait orientation. To change either margins or layout, select the Page Layout ribbon, Page Setup group, then whichever tool you require. You can alter the default top, bottom, left or right margins, and change the orientation as you wish. The margins are measured in centimetres. Line Spacing Line spacing is just one of the ways you can alter paragraph formatting. Other ways include alignment, the way the first line relates to the rest of the paragraph and whether there is an indent or not. By default, Word uses single line spacing, no indentation and left alignment. To change line spacing in the whole document, select all of the text by pressing Ctrl and A together (Select All). Now select the Home ribbon, Paragraph group. Under the Indents and Spacing tab, change Line spacing to 1.5 or whichever style you require. Keyboard shortcuts for line spacing: Double Ctrl 2 One and a half Ctrl 5 Single Ctrl 1 Formatting Reports in Word 2010.doc 1
Page Numbers To add page numbers to your assignment, select the Insert ribbon, Page Number tool. You can choose the position and alignment from the various options available. NOTE: If you choose one of the Page Number templates, it deletes any other information you have entered in the header or footer where the page numbers are placed. You will have to put it back again! Headers and Footers The header and footer areas in a document are the spaces in the top and bottom margins. You can insert text into these areas which appears on every page. In an assignment it is good practice to put your name and perhaps the assignment title in the footer area, usually at the right side. To insert text into the header or footer, select the Insert ribbon, and click either the Header or Footer tools. You can select a blank header, into which you type your own text, or choose from a list of options with predefined content and styles. Once you have chosen a style, or if you click Edit Header or Footer, a special Header and Footer ribbon appears, with relevant tools, and you can see the Header area ready for editing. There are three in-built tab stops in the Header and Footer. Press the Tab key to move between the left, the middle and the right. Type your name and/or assignment title. You can adjust the font size by using the formatting buttons on the toolbar. When you are satisfied with how it looks, click the Close button, or double click on the main document text. Note that to have a different header or footer in different parts of your document, you must use sections, which is not covered in this document. Heading Styles A style is a group of formatting elements saved under one name, usually including font, size and any other decoration. The Normal style is usually the font Times New Roman, size 12, and this is always applied to text unless you specify otherwise. As you use or create different groups of formatting in a document, they will be added to the style list, in case you want to use it again. Useful styles are Heading 1, 2 and 3. These are predefined styles that look good when used for titles and section headings. They are the default styles used in forming a table of contents, which will be covered below. Styles are displayed on the Home ribbon, Styles group. You can scroll down the list to see lots more. You can preview what a style will look like in your text by Formatting Reports in Word 2010.doc 2
moving the mouse over a style, and it will temporarily be applied to your text. To apply a style, highlight the text you want to apply it to, and select the style from the list by clicking. Bullets and Numbering Lists of text look good if they are formatted with bullets Numbering (black dots) before the items in the list. Alternatively, a list might suit being numbered. These tools are on the Home ribbon, Paragraph group. To apply either bullets or numbering, either: Type the list, pressing the Enter key after each item. Then highlight the block of text containing Bullets the list, and click the Bullet or Number button on the ribbon. Click the Bullet or Number button, then type the list, pressing the Enter key after each item. The list will appear numbered or bulleted. When you continue adding items to a bulleted or numbered list, a new bullet or number will appear for the new item. Once you have finished, press Enter again to go to a new line without bullets or numbers. You can modify the bullet or number style, as well as the amount of indentation before and after the bullet or number, by clicking on the arrow next to the bullet tool and altering settings. Multilevel Lists Multilevel Lists (in Word 2003 this was called Outline numbering) applies an indented numbering system to text. Highlight the text you want to have this applied to. Select the Home ribbon, and click the Multilevel List tool on the Paragraph group. You can then one of the styles you like. You can alter the outline number styles by clicking Define. To combine Heading Styles with Multilevel lists, use the style shown at the right. To use outline numbering to full effect, you also have to use the Increase Indent button on paragraphs that should be indented and formatted with the various numbering styles. Multilevel list tool Increase or decrease indent Inserting a Table of Contents A Table of Contents at the beginning of a document can be useful if your document is long, and is especially suited to report-style documents. A table of contents picks up the headings you use throughout your document, and skips the normal body text, showing the page numbers. To use a table of contents, you must have first formatted your headings with styles that a table of contents can use. The easiest way to do this is to format your headings with the predefined Heading Styles. By default, the style list Formatting Reports in Word 2010.doc 3
shows three Heading Styles - 1, 2 and 3, and you can use these to format the headings in your document at various levels of importance. First go through your document and format each of the headings in this way. (Normally three levels are sufficient, but if you need more, you can create your own). Once you have formatted headings in the way you want, go to the top of the document and place the cursor at the point you wish the table of contents to appear. (You might want it to be on a separate page, in which case you can insert a page break as above). Select the References ribbon, then click the Table of Contents tool. You can choose between the TOC styles shown. After you have inserted a table of contents, you will probably add or delete text at some point. To refresh the table of contents to reflect your changes, use the Update Table tool on the References ribbon, or right click in the middle of the table and choose Update Field. You can choose to update just the page numbers, or update the entire table (recommended, as this takes into account any new headings you have put in or ones you have deleted). Tables Table are a very powerful way of setting out data that needs to displayed in rows and columns, such as in a report. You can also use tabs for this, but tables give you more control. When you work with a table, two new Table Tools ribbons appears Design and Layout, each with tools specific to table design and layout. If you can t see these ribbons, make sure you have the cursor somewhere in the table. This is a table Move from cell to cell in a table with the Tab key. To alter the widths of columns, drag the line between columns with Select the Insert ribbon and click the Table tool. To insert a new row at the bottom of a table, press the Tab key when you are in the last cell. Although the height of rows is automatically determined by the text You can determine how many columns and rows by dragging your mouse over the number required. To change how the borders look (you can make the borders invisible if you wish), highlight the cell, row or column you want to format, then use the Borders tool on the Table Tools/Design ribbon. To insert a row in between other rows, highlight the row below or above and select Formatting Reports in Word 2010.doc 4
your mouse. There are many formatting tools for tables on the Table ribbons. in them, you can further heighten a row by dragging the line between rows with your mouse. either the Insert Above or Insert Below tools on the Table Tools/Layout ribbon. You can insert columns in the same way. To make two table cells join together with the text across both cells, highlight both cells and choose Merge Cells from the Table Tools/Layout ribbon. Page Breaks A page break forces the cursor to go to the top of a new page. This can be useful if you want to start a new topic, or if a paragraph is otherwise broken up in an unnatural way. To insert a page break, place the cursor at the point where you want the new page to occur, select Page Break from the Insert ribbon, Pages group. The cursor and text will move to the top of a new page. To remove a page break, place the cursor just before the first character on the page and press the Backspace key. Organising your document with Sections Sometimes you want to structure your document so that it has a different page setup in different parts of the document. For example, one section might suit being landscape orientation, whereas the rest is portrait. You might want one part to have a different header or footer to another part. To achieve this you need to break your document into sections. To insert a section, select the Page Layout ribbon then Page Setup group. Click the Breaks tool, and you will see a list of Break options, including Section Breaks as follows: Next page - starts the section at the top of the next page (inserts a page break) Continuous - starts the section at the cursor without inserting a new page Even page - starts the section at the top of the next even numbered page Odd page - starts the section at the top of the next odd numbered page Cover Page A report should usually have a cover or title page. One way to create a cover page is to create a new one-page Word document, so that any formatting elements in the main report are not applied to it. Alternatively, you can create the title page as a separate section in the main report. Word 2010 has a great tool for this called Cover Page, found on the Insert ribbon. You can choose from many different styles, and you just fill in the title, your name, etc. The cover page is inserted at the beginning automatically, and is separated from the first page of text by a page break. Formatting Reports in Word 2010.doc 5
Footnotes and Endnotes Often in an essay or report you want to put a short explanatory note about something, or the source of a reference, at the bottom of the page. If it is at the bottom of the page it is a Footnote, and if it is at the end of the document it is an Endnote. To insert a footnote like this 1, select the References ribbon, Footnotes group, and click Insert Footnote. You will automatically be taken to the bottom of the page, where you type your footnote text. Once you have typed the text, you can move back to the original text, and see that a number will be been placed as a superscript at the cursor point. You can customise the way footnotes and endnotes look by clicking the arrow at the bottom right of the Footnotes group. 1 This is a footnote related to number one in the paragraph on footnotes above. Formatting Reports in Word 2010.doc 6