By Tonya Wishart

Applies to
Microsoft Office XP

Some ideas for making school projects easier than they used to be, like creating a timeline (without affecting your hairline) and adding footnotes to a research paper, from someone who wishes she'd had then what she has now (Microsoft Office XP).

While rummaging through old papers and things the other day, I became a bit nostalgic when I found a package of transfer letters. You know, the sheets full of characters that you line up on your report title page and rub the back of the letter with a pencil until the letter magically sticks to your page? Then you simply repeat the process for each letter in your title while trying to produce a straight line and not break any of the fragile characters. This was back when creating a title page was a major time investment.

After enjoying a few moments of nostalgia, I turned the transfer letters over to my 5-year-old to play with. He thought they were cool, probably comparable to the thrill of playing with a record player, or a phone with a cord. Thanks to technology and software like Office XP, those old, slow ways of doing school projects are a thing of the past. Now it's easy to use Microsoft Word to create a title page with multiple font types and sizes, use a built-in dictionary and spelling checker (no more white-out), and not even think twice about printing text in straight lines.

I started thinking about other Office XP and Internet features that would have saved me countless hours when I was in school. Here are a few tips on "the new ways" of doing things to save time for you and your budding science project finalist.

Lab papers

In college, I had the pleasure (ha) of writing numerous lab papers complete with section numbering, tables of data, drawings, and charts. I can still remember trying to leave enough space on the page as I typed (yes, typed) text so that the drawings or graphs I photocopied onto the page would fit. Today, I would use Word to write the paper, use automatic numbering to format the headings and paragraphs, copy and paste data and graphs from Microsoft Excel, and control how the text flowed around the pasted information.

Here are some tips on how you can do it the new and easy way, too.

To add numbers to headings in Word

Note  If you use built-in Word heading styles (that is, formatting applied to a heading — Word has nine different built-in styles) to format headings in your report, you can automatically number headings with the numbering format you choose.

1. Select a heading you want to number.
2. On the Format menu, click Bullets and Numbering, and then click the Outline Numbered tab.
3. Click a numbering format that contains the text "Heading 1," "Heading 2," and so on, and then click OK.

To copy Excel data and paste into a Word document

1. In Excel, select the data you want to copy.
2. On the Edit menu, click Copy.
3. In Word, select the location in the document where you want to paste the data.
4. On the Edit menu, click Paste Special and select the option you want.
   
   

   Note   If you paste the data as a Microsoft Excel Worksheet Object, Picture, or Bitmap, the data is treated as a picture in Word. You can control how text flows around the picture by using the Text Wrapping button on the Picture toolbar. Features like this make these reports much easier than they used to be!

Timelines

In junior high school, one of my nightmare history projects was creating a timeline of events. It sounds straightforward, but even after I gave up and went to bed, my dad was up into the wee hours of the morning, recording items by hand with pencil and paper. The assigned events, of course, were not given out in any particular order. There was much erasing as we tried to get all the events recorded in the correct order and spaced so that they all fit on the page.

Today, I could use Excel or a table in Word to record the events, sort by date to get the correct order, and then use the drawing tools to create the graphical representation. I could even use a timeline template from the Template Gallery (see the More information section below).

You can save your kids late-night headaches (and save yourself, too) by using these tips.

To sort a list of dates and events (by date) in an Excel worksheet

1. Click a cell in the column that contains the dates.
2. On the Standard toolbar, click Sort Ascending or Sort Descending.

To sort a list or table of dates and events (by date) in a Word document

1. Select the list or table you want to sort.
2. On the Table menu, click Sort.
3. If your list or table has a header row (for example, headings such as Date and Event at the top of the list), select Header row under My list has.
4. In the Sort by box, select the heading or field you want to sort by, such as Date.
5. In the Type box, select Date.

Footnotes, endnotes, and cross-references

Does anyone else remember trying to superscript numbers using a typewriter, or literally cutting and pasting (like with Elmer's glue) strips of paper to label photocopied diagrams? Today, Word makes this process easy and automatic with the footnote, endnote, and cross-reference features.

Note reference marks
Separator line
Footnote text
Endnote text

To insert a footnote or endnote in your document

1. Locate the position where you want the number to go.
2. On the Insert menu, point to Reference, and then click Footnote.
3. To insert an endnote, select the Endnotes option.

In the Footnote and Endnote dialog box, you can also select a number format or a custom mark to use as the note reference mark. If you save your document as a Web page, Word even changes your footnotes and endnotes to hyperlinks automatically and moves the footnotes to the end.

You can also create a cross-reference in Word to refer to an item that appears in another location in the document — for example, when you have a sentence or caption like "See Figure 1." You can create a cross-reference to a heading, footnote, bookmark, caption, or numbered paragraph in Word.

To create a cross-reference

• Point to Reference on the Insert menu, and then click Cross-reference.

Research papers

I remember using the MLA handbook to look up the rules for writing research papers. And I remember finding information from the encyclopedias at the school library. With online references (like dictionaries, thesauruses, encyclopedias), the MLA Web site, and the help of the Template Gallery again, this process would have been much shorter and easier.

To use the Thesaurus in Word

• Select a word in your document, point to Language on the Tools menu, and then click Thesaurus. Or, look up a word directly in the dialog box by typing it in. (To save even more time, select a word and press the shortcut key SHIFT+F7.)

Now I'm wondering what technology I'll be using in another 15 years that could have really saved me time creating this article.

Related templates

Visit the Microsoft Office Online Templates site to find these and other helpful templates:

• Timeline (Excel)
• Timeline — requires Word 2000 or later
• Modern Language Association Web site
• Research paper template in MLA format
• Research paper template in APA format
• Papers and Reports section in the Template Gallery

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About the author

Tonya Wishart is a technical writer for the Office User Assistance team. She has enjoyed her "relationship" with Microsoft Word (and its relatives), which has been an adventure in learning, documenting, and supporting other users, for the past 11 years.

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