Orakeltjenesten, NTNU IT
Formatting your Master's thesis in
Microsoft Word
A comprehensive guide
Master's thesis in Text Processing
Trondheim, July 2013
Supervisor: Bill Gates
Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Faculty of Computer Guidance
Department of Microsoft Word
Abstract
Working with a text as long as a Master’s thesis in a text processor can be a challenge. Starting
at the very basics, this guide aims to teach you the essentials necessary to handle and format
large documents in Microsoft Word. It also serves as a visual example of what your printed
thesis may look like.
The abstract is a brief summary of your thesis, and should not be more than a page. In an
academic publication, the abstract should always be the first section after the title page.
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Preface/Dedication/…
After the abstract comes the rest of the front matter – preface, dedication, acknowledgement,
etc. What you want to include here, and in which order, is up to you, as long as it is relevant for
your Master’s thesis. See Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_designFront_matter.
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Table of contents
List of figures .............................................................................................................. ix
List of tables ................................................................................................................ xi
Abbreviations ............................................................................................................ xiii
1 INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................. 1
1.1 Backup .................................................................................................................. 2
1.2 Paper format and margins ..................................................................................... 3
1.3 Fonts ..................................................................................................................... 4
1.3.1 Special fonts ................................................................................................. 4
2 INTRODUCTION TO MICROSOFT WORD 2013 ........................................... 5
2.1 Page setup ............................................................................................................. 6
2.2 Different Views .................................................................................................... 7
2.3 Remove formatting ............................................................................................... 7
2.4 Show hidden formatting ....................................................................................... 8
2.5 Breaks ................................................................................................................... 8
3 STYLES ................................................................................................................. 11
3.1 The Normal style ................................................................................................ 12
3.2 Modifying a style ................................................................................................ 13
3.3 Headings ............................................................................................................. 15
3.3.1 Outline level ............................................................................................... 16
3.3.2 Chapter numbering ..................................................................................... 16
3.4 Creating your own styles .................................................................................... 17
3.5 Saving your styles in a Style Set ........................................................................ 18
4 CAPTIONS, NOTES, QUOTES AND REFERENCES .................................... 19
4.1 Captions .............................................................................................................. 19
4.1.1 Longer captions .......................................................................................... 20
4.2 Footnotes ............................................................................................................ 20
4.3 Quotes ................................................................................................................. 21
4.4 References .......................................................................................................... 22
4.4.1 EndNote ...................................................................................................... 22
4.4.2 Reference styles .......................................................................................... 23
5 TABLES, PICTURES AND SHAPES ................................................................ 25
5.1 Creating a table ................................................................................................... 25
5.2 Table Styles ........................................................................................................ 26
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5.3 Inserting a picture ............................................................................................... 28
5.3.1 Picture quality ............................................................................................. 32
5.4 Large tables......................................................................................................... 32
5.5 Shapes and Text Boxes ....................................................................................... 35
6 REVIEW YOUR DOCUMENT: SPELL CHECK, COMMENTS AND
TRACK CHANGES ............................................................................................. 37
6.1 Spell check .......................................................................................................... 37
6.2 Comments ........................................................................................................... 38
6.3 Track changes ..................................................................................................... 39
7 SECTIONS AND PAGE NUMBERS ................................................................. 41
7.1 Insert a Section Break ......................................................................................... 41
7.2 Page Setup revisited ........................................................................................... 42
7.3 Headers and footers ............................................................................................ 43
7.4 Page Numbers ..................................................................................................... 44
7.4.1 Page Number Format .................................................................................. 46
8 AUTOMATIC TABLE OF CONTENTS ........................................................... 49
8.1 Formatting the Table of Contents ....................................................................... 49
8.2 Including more than 3 heading levels ................................................................. 50
8.2.1 Missing headings ........................................................................................ 51
8.3 Updating the Table of Contents .......................................................................... 51
8.4 List of Figures and List of Tables ....................................................................... 52
9 PREPARING YOUR DOCUMENT FOR PRINTING .................................... 53
9.1 Title page ............................................................................................................ 53
9.2 Insert blank pages ............................................................................................... 54
9.3 Creating a PDF file ............................................................................................. 56
9.4 Printing your thesis ............................................................................................. 57
9.4.1 Cover .......................................................................................................... 58
10 MACROS AND FIELD CODES ......................................................................... 59
10.1 Macros ................................................................................................................ 59
10.2 Field Codes ......................................................................................................... 61
APPENDIX A: KEYBOARD SHORTCUTS IN MICROSOFT WORD
APPENDIX B: USEFUL SOFTWARE
APPENDIX C: STYLES USED IN THIS DOCUMENT
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List of figures
Figure 1.1 Comparison of A4 and B5 formats ................................................................. 3
Figure 1.2 Three recommended standard fonts. ............................................................... 4
Figure 2.1 The program window in Word 2013 ............................................................... 5
Figure 2.2 Opening the Page Setup box ........................................................................... 6
Figure 2.3 Page Setup ....................................................................................................... 6
Figure 2.4 View ribbon ..................................................................................................... 7
Figure 2.5 Clear All Formatting ....................................................................................... 7
Figure 2.6 Show / Hide ¶ .................................................................................................. 8
Figure 2.7 Inserting a page break ..................................................................................... 9
Figure 3.1 Locating the Styles menu .............................................................................. 11
Figure 3.2 The Style Pane............................................................................................... 11
Figure 3.3 Different ways of separating paragraphs....................................................... 12
Figure 3.4 Text alignment .............................................................................................. 13
Figure 3.5 Modifying a Style .......................................................................................... 13
Figure 3.6 Modifying the Normal style .......................................................................... 14
Figure 3.7 Set Paragraph rules for Normal style ............................................................ 14
Figure 3.8 Update style to match selection .................................................................... 15
Figure 3.9 Numbered headings ....................................................................................... 17
Figure 3.10 Update the new style to match selected text ............................................... 18
Figure 3.11 Saving a new Style Set ................................................................................ 18
Figure 4.1 Insert caption ................................................................................................. 19
Figure 4.2 Insert caption step 2 ...................................................................................... 19
Figure 4.3 Longer captions ............................................................................................. 20
Figure 4.4 Insert footnote ............................................................................................... 20
Figure 4.5 Unwanted space between footnote separator and footnotes ......................... 21
Figure 4.6 Edit the footnote separator ............................................................................ 21
Figure 4.7 The EndNote tab in Word ............................................................................. 22
Figure 5.1 The Insert tab ................................................................................................ 25
Figure 5.2 Inserting a table ............................................................................................. 25
Figure 5.3 Table Tools: Design tab ................................................................................ 26
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Figure 5.4 View Gridlines .............................................................................................. 26
Figure 5.5 Creating a new Table Style ........................................................................... 27
Figure 5.6 One-celled table with no borders .................................................................. 28
Figure 5.7 Insert picture.................................................................................................. 28
Figure 5.8 Picture inside table ........................................................................................ 29
Figure 5.9 Resizing a picture .......................................................................................... 29
Figure 5.10 Resizing a table ........................................................................................... 30
Figure 5.11 Resized picture in resized table ................................................................... 30
Figure 5.12 Setting picture border .................................................................................. 31
Figure 5.13 Picture with border ...................................................................................... 31
Figure 5.14 Paste Special ............................................................................................... 33
Figure 5.15 Rotate the table picture ............................................................................... 33
Figure 5.16 Insert a shape ............................................................................................... 35
Figure 5.17 Shape anchored within a table..................................................................... 35
Figure 5.18 Format shape ............................................................................................... 36
Figure 6.1 Set Proofing Language .................................................................................. 37
Figure 6.2 Dictionary installed ....................................................................................... 37
Figure 6.3 Add additional languages .............................................................................. 37
Figure 6.4 Start the spell check ...................................................................................... 38
Figure 6.5 New Comment .............................................................................................. 38
Figure 6.6 Show comment .............................................................................................. 39
Figure 6.7 Track Changes ............................................................................................... 39
Figure 7.1 View Sections in the Status Bar .................................................................... 41
Figure 7.2 Insert a Section Break ................................................................................... 42
Figure 7.3 Section Break: Next Page ............................................................................. 42
Figure 7.4 Opening the Page Setup box ......................................................................... 43
Figure 7.5 Page Setup box .............................................................................................. 43
Figure 7.6 Double-click near the bottom of the page ..................................................... 44
Figure 7.7 Header & Footer tools tab ............................................................................. 44
Figure 7.8 Different positions of page numbers ............................................................. 45
Figure 7.9 Insert centre aligned page numbers ............................................................... 45
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Figure 7.10 Different Odd & Even Pages ...................................................................... 46
Figure 7.11 Left aligned page numbers on even pages .................................................. 46
Figure 7.12 Page Number Format .................................................................................. 47
Figure 8.1 Insert Table of Contents ................................................................................ 49
Figure 8.2 Table of Contents options ............................................................................. 50
Figure 8.3 Update Table of Contents ............................................................................. 51
Figure 8.4 Insert Table of Figures .................................................................................. 52
Figure 8.5 Table of Figures options ............................................................................... 52
Figure 9.1 Formatting the Title Page .............................................................................. 53
Figure 9.2 Odd & Even pages ........................................................................................ 54
Figure 9.3 Two-sided view ............................................................................................. 55
Figure 9.4 Word Options: Save ...................................................................................... 56
Figure 9.5 Save as PDF .................................................................................................. 57
Figure 9.6 Standard NTNU Master's thesis cover .......................................................... 58
Figure 9.7 Official NTNU colours ................................................................................. 58
Figure 10.1 Customize the Status Bar. ........................................................................... 59
Figure 10.2 Macro toolbar .............................................................................................. 59
Figure 10.3 Record Macro ............................................................................................. 60
Figure 10.4 Stop Macro recording ................................................................................. 60
Figure 10.5 Table of contents field code ........................................................................ 61
Figure 10.6 Example Field Code .................................................................................... 61
Figure 10.7 Insert Field .................................................................................................. 62
List of tables
Table 2.1 Different breaks in Word. ................................................................................. 8
Table 5.1 Example table ................................................................................................. 25
Table 5.2 Rotated table ................................................................................................... 34
Table 10.1 Field Code keyboard shortcuts ..................................................................... 61
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Abbreviations
1 2
After the lists of figures and tables comes your list of Abbreviations . Acronyms that
need explaining should also be included here.
To make a well-ordered list, it is a good idea to write this list in a table of two columns,
with the abbreviations to the left and the explanation to the right. Remember to turn off
the table borders (chapter 5.1). It may also be a good idea to right-align the abbreviations.
Also remember to sort your abbreviations in alphabetical order.
APA American Psychological Association
NTNU Norwegian University of Science and Technology
Portable Document Format
PDF
TOC Table of Contents
USB Universal Serial Bus
Virtual Private Network
VPN
1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbreviation
2
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acronym
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1 Introduction
Microsoft Word offers a set of tools and automated functions that can be of great help when
writing you Master’s thesis. This guide aims to ease the workload when it comes to the formal
aspects of your thesis: text formatting, page numbers, table of contents and more.
Many will already have written part (or all) of their thesis when they start worrying about their
thesis formatting. While your formatting may look fine now, there could still be details to fix.
It is recommended that you, even if you are well underway with your writing, re-do your
formatting by the standards of this document. This will ensure consistency throughout your
text, and will also help eliminating small errors and hiccups. This is especially relevant when it
comes to using styles for headings, so that the table of contents can be made to work
automatically, rather than requiring you to update it manually.
The chapters in this guide are written more or less in the order you will need them. Some are
more important than others: Chapter 3 Styles, 4 Captions, notes, quotes and references, 7
Sections and page numbers and 8 Automatic Table of Contents.
This guide is written in Microsoft Word 2013 on a Windows 8 installation, and while older
versions of Office (2007 and 2010) on Windows will look more or less the same, Office users
on Mac will find bigger differences. Mac users are encouraged to use Google to find solutions.
While the guide is written in English, most of the instructions are in both English (EN) and
Norwegian (NO).
At the very end of this document, there are three appendices: one with keyboard shortcuts in
Microsoft Word, one with a list of useful software you can get from NTNU or for free, and one
with a list of the Styles used to format this document.
If you find errors or have suggestions to improvements, please let us know.
Contact us by email:
dragvollorakelntnu.no
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1.1 Backup
It cannot be stressed enough how important it is to regularly take backup of the documents
you are working on (and other important files – as your EndNote library – for that matter).
Saving a copy of your file on the same physical hard drive (even if it is another drive
letter) may be useful, but do not rely on it as a backup. Hard drive failures do occur and
can happen anytime.
USB sticks are useful for file transfers, but not ideal for backup purposes. It can
malfunction, and it is easy to lose or forget.
External hard drives are a popular choice. While better than USB sticks, these are also
prone to hard drive failures.
Email, Dropbox and similar online storage solutions can be a quick and effective way
of taking a backup and sharing your files between different locations.
o If your thesis contains sensitive personal data, you cannot use Dropbox or other
third party services to take your backup.
o Beware: When opening documents from the web (email, Dropbox web interface,
etc), always right click and choose “Save as” and place the file somewhere safe,
like in your Documents-folder. Otherwise, your document will open in a
temporary folder, and can be lost when you close Word.
We recommend that you always save a copy of your thesis files to NTNU’s servers. All
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students have their own personal home directory with 10 GB storage. These are the advantages
of using the NTNU server for your files:
You can have access to your files no matter which computer you are using at NTNU. If
you are not physically at the university, you can access your files by using Virtual
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Private Network (VPN) .
If you accidently delete or damage files that are stored in your area of the NTNU server,
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you can try to restore a previous version. See instructions on Innsida , or contact Orakel
Support Services if you need assistance.
3 https://innsida.ntnu.no/wiki/-/wiki/English/Your+files+on+the+NTNU+server
4 https://innsida.ntnu.no/wiki/-/wiki/English/Install+VPN
5 https://innsida.ntnu.no/wiki/-
/wiki/English/Restoring+files+on+network+directories
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1.2 Paper format and margins
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You may print your thesis in A4 or B5. We recommend that you choose B5 . This will make
your printed thesis look more like a book and less like a brochure. However, you should write
your thesis in the A4 format. The printing office will automatically reduce the size before they
print it. This will not affect the number of pages in your document. Read more about the printing
process in chapter 9.
Figure 1.1 Comparison of A4 and B5 formats
We recommend to use MS Word’s standard margins, at 2,5 cm left, right, top and bottom.
Adjusting these settings is covered in chapter 2.1.
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Unless your department has told you to use A4.
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1.3 Fonts
Word comes with lots of different fonts, but you should use standard fonts when you write your
thesis. Do not use colour on headings: All your text should be black.
For body text, use Times New Roman, size 12, line spacing 1,5. This is the standard at
most departments at NTNU. Captions and text in figures should also be Times New
Roman.
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For headings, use Arial .
For source code, use Courier New, size 11, single line spacing.
Thick and
Serifs
thin strokes
Serif font
Used for
body text
Times New Roman
Strokes have
even width
Sans-serif font
Plain
Arial
Used for headings
Every space
and character
requires the
same space
Monospaced font
Used for code
Courier New
Figure 1.2 Three recommended standard fonts.
1.3.1 Special fonts
Some students need special fonts to find the characters they need (e.g. Old Norse characters).
Contact your department or Orakel Support Services if you need help to find or install special
fonts.
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See chapter 3.3 and Appendix C for formatting of different heading levels.
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2 Introduction to Microsoft Word 2013
We will start by introducing the program window and its different parts:
Quick
Document
File menu
Ribbon
Help (F1)
Ribbon tabs
access
title
toolbar
Click for more
options
Status bar
Marker
Writing area
(blinking)
Scroll bar
Ruler
Zoom
View options
Figure 2.1 The program window in Word 2013
File menu lets you create, open, save and print your document.
The Ribbon gives you access to the most used functions, while the tab lets you select
a different ribbon. Right click to customize.
Quick access toolbar gives you easy access to much used functions. Right click to
customize.
The Status bar tells you what is going on. Which page, section, how many words,
which language etc. Right click to customize.
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2.1 Page setup
Start by setting up your page size and margins. You can also do this later on, but it can then
change the number of pages in your document.
EN: Page Layout (tab) Click the little arrow in the bottom right corner
NO: Sideoppsett (fane) Klikk den lille pila nederst til høyre
Figure 2.2 Opening the Page Setup box
Margins
Set all your margins to 2,5
Orientation: Portrait
Paper
Paper size: A4
Layout
Section start: New page
Header/Footer: 1,25 cm
Vertical alignment: Top
Select Apply to: Whole
document. Click OK.
Figure 2.3 Page Setup
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