By way of intro, I didn’t grow up with MS Word, and don’t like it as a program. I really don’t understand it. It’s not intuitive to me.
That said, I have to use it.
I’m doing a paper with footnotes. I want the footnotes to be in font size 10. I can do that.
I want there to be an automatic space between the footnotes. I recently figured out how to do that, with a 6 point space automatically in-between. Yay me!
But I want that font size and line in-between to happen automatically with each footnote, instead of me formatting each footnote as I insert them.
Rumour has it that I have to do something with Styles? Waxzzat? How?
I’ve tried looking in Word’s “help” feature and have concluded it remains as un-helpful for techno-peasants as when I first had to start using Word.
You apply the style to some text. You apply formatting to a style. Then all the text that has that style automatically receives the formatting.
I think there’s a footnote style. Try making a footnote and then formatting the footnote style to your liking. Or maybe there isn’t a footnote style, then make one and apply it to your footnotes. It’s easy, if you select a style, the paragraph you’re in is set to that style, you don’t have to select exactly what you want to apply the style to (although you can, of course).
What I do when I’m having to go through something that’s got formatting I want to change is:
I choose a paragraph that’s in a given style, let’s say “Footnote”. I format it until it looks ok. Then I select it, right click on its style in the styles menu and choose “change style to match selection” (paraphrased from memory, may not be exact). That automatically changes every item in that style to be the way I like, both parts that already exist and whatever I add later.
If you are going to use a certain set of styles often, set them up and then save the document as a template. Then you can use that template as the basis for any document and it will already have your styles. This is what’s done for example in corporate settings to make sure everybody’s documents comply with company styles.
Not a threads hit; by dint of trying to make Word into the poor man’s desktop publishing system rather than just a word processor, they’ve turn it into an unwieldy, bug-ridden, distended anus of software. It is pretty much the exemplar for bloatware, which is exacerbated by the fact that when they change revisions they break major features that require reformatting documents. The fact that there are such a vast array of websites and “Idiot’s Guide to…” books explaining how to work around the problems that Word presents users for even simple things like adding endnotes or list numbering indicates just how terrible this software is. Unfortunately, OpenOffice Writer isn’t substantially better. To see how a user-friendly word processor should work, you have to look to something like the OS X Pages application.
Word sucks. Unfortunately, Excel is even worse when people try to use it to do real number crunching. It is the bane of my existence. It is so, so, awful. I could go on all day about how terrible it is. I won’t, but I could.
Format a footnote to your liking. Up at the top, you should see a style named “Footnote” (click on the little arrow in the styles box to scroll right if it’s not visible, but it should be if your cursor is in a footnote). Right-click on that box, and use the mouse to select “Update Style to Match Selection.” This should format all your footnotes accordingly.
Yes. Unfortunately they removed the menus so what you have to do is stare at the boxes until you find one that might do what you want and then see if it does. Explaining this in text for someone with an unknown version of Word is not a realistic possibility.
The way it was already explained in that same post.
OK, I actually have a document in Word open in front of me right now. The majority of the document is left-aligned, which I hate; I want it justified as is proper. In the “home” tab itself, I can see that the Style being used for the “body” text is called Normal (it’s framed in yellow in the list of styles). I can also see, by clicking in one of them (so the cursor is actually IN it) that the headings use a different Style, Heading3. Bullet-points lists follow the Style Bullets.
I want to modify everything that’s in Normal so it becomes Justified, without affecting the other two. Why? Because I need an example, duh.
a1) Click on a Normal paragraph, so the cursor is in it.
a2) Click on Justified. That paragraph becomes justified but the rest is still left-aligned.
a3) In the list of Styles, find Normal, which is framed in yellow because it’s the style that corresponds to the paragraph holding the cursor.
a4) Right-click Normal. In the menu, click “Update Normal to Match Selection”. Every paragraph which is Normal is now justified.
OK, so I want to save this group of three Styles for later use.
b1) Click on the File tab.
b2) Click on Save As.
b3) Give the file a name and choose format type “Word Template”. The file will have the extension .dot and its icon looks like one of those notepads which are designed to be carried in a clipboard.
And now I want to create a new document using that format. The safest way:
c1) File
c2) New
c3) New from existing
c4) Choose your template
If you’re still having problems I can do it with pics.
I find that my Word footnotes always come out with odd formatting and that Styles is weirdly selective about when it should apply… uh, itself. So when I’m finished with the document, I change all the footnotes to endnotes, apply whatever formatting I want to them with block selection, and then convert them back to footnotes.
