Thesis Formatting for MES

These are tips to help MES students build and format their thesis. They are based on the MES Thesis Handbook and former students's suggestions. This assumes use of Microsoft Word 2007, other versions may vary. Feel free to contribute other solutions (even using different editors such as open office)!

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. Also, using the format>tab feature at the beginning of each section, you can set appropriate (and consistent) tab stops for each section. Doing this before adding content can save time.

Don't copy and paste from another Word Document

This can transfer formatting to your current document and mess it up. It's hard to fix, but you can prevent it. Copy 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 you correctly paste excel data into Word. 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 paste it as an object into Word or link the spreadsheet into word. This way you can edit your excel spreadsheet and it will update your document, but if you move or delete one of the files, the word document can get corrupted and hard to recover. To run less risk of corrupting your data, copy and paste the excel data or create an image first.

Use Reveal Formatting

Things go wrong? Format>reveal formatting will show you exactly where you are and the formatting of the current page. Also, view>thumbnails shows where you are in the document.

Additional Help

• Page numbering for Different Sections
• Footnotes and Endnotes
• Table of Contents
• Odd and Even Footers
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