Writing a good piece of work is just half work done. The first impression that the readers receive from your write-up is formatting. No matter, how hard you have tried on your writing and a good selection of words, if your paper is not well-formatted, all your efforts may go wasted. Below, I have mentioned some areas that can help you in the good formatting of your produced work.
If you open a new Microsoft Word file, you will have Calibri font with 11 points selected by default. It is not a recommended style for academic and professional work. You should change the font to either Times New Roman or Arial and the font size should be 12. The next area of consideration is Paragraph settings. The default line spacing is set to Multiple. You should change the line spacing to either 1.5 lines or Double spacing.
The default heading style in Microsoft Word is presented in light-blue color and large fonts. Change the heading styles to Times New Roman or Calibri Font with 12 point font size. While changing the heading styles for the first time, select the whole heading, right-click Heading x, and select Update Heading x to Match Selection. In this way, you will not have to change the style while writing each heading.
You will also be required to present a Table of Contents, for which you should use the built-in Table of Contents feature of Microsoft Word. There is a good option of Navigation Pane in Microsoft Word. Activate this option when you are working on a large document. It will show all headings and subheadings and you can quickly switch to any specific heading. You may also find some Body Text in the navigation pane. It is appearing because you have inadvertently set the Body Text to a Heading style. Change the style of the Body Text back to Normal and it will disappear from the navigation pane.
For academic purposes, Microsoft Word also presents the auto-referencing feature under the References tab. You can click Insert Citation and Add New Source to add a variety of sources such as Journal Article, Book, Report, and Website. When you use this auto-referencing feature, a bibliography can be generated and updated automatically by clicking Bibliography. You can select different referencing styles from the Style dropdown such as APA, Harvard, and MLA.
When you use the Insert Caption feature of Microsoft Word under the References tab, Tables and Figures are numbered automatically. The good thing is that you can then generate the List of Figures and List of Tables automatically by clicking Insert Table of Figures. Even if you change the position of any Table or Figure, the numbers are updated automatically by Microsoft Word. You can also use the Cross-reference feature to refer to any table or figure in the text. When you use this feature, the table and figure numbers are automatically updated when you change the position of any passage or text.
When you use these techniques and tips, you will produce a professional-looking write-up with impressive formatting. If you want any assistance in your formatting tasks, feel free to contact us through our website.
