Thesis Formatting for MES
Preformat your document before you start
Format a blank document with all the necessary components, sections, pagination, etc. This will save you much time in the long run.
Don't copy and paste from another Word Document
Word transfers formatting often, which can clash with the formatting of your current document and screw up its formatting. This is hard to fix, but you can prevent it by copying text into a text editor (notepad, textmate, etc.), to strip out the formatting. Copy it again from there, and paste it into your current document.
Excel data gotchas
Excel and Word play nicely together but beware when pasting excel spreadsheets and graphs into Word that you do it right. You can copy and paste directly from excel to word, so creating a word table, but it won't look like Excel. You can inset the worksheet as an object from file, and either paste it as an object into Word or link the spreadsheet into word, which has pros and cons. The pro is that you can edit your excel spreadsheet and it will update your document. The con is that they are linked, and if you move or delete one of the files, the word document can get corrupted and a pain to recover. If you want to insert excel data, copy and paste it or create an image first, to run less risk of corrupting your data.
Additional Help: word to excel]
Do tabs right
Although you can set tabs on the fly and to specific paragraphs, if you have sections which have consistent tab requirements, it pays to set these first before you start adding content. By using the format>tab feature at the beginning of each section, you can set appropriate (and consistent) tab stops for each section.
Use Reveal Formatting
Whenever you find yourself in a bind, format>reveal formatting will show you exactly where you are and what formatting is being applied to the page you're on. For additional information it's also helpful to go to view>thumbnails to see where you are in the document.
