Word bugs - document map

For a doctoral thesis you have to write a l-o-n-g document with several chapters, contents, appendices, so you need to use styles, but Word 2007 sometimes changes styles such as captions to a high level, which messes up the document map. I think I've found the trick solve this problem.

Go to Word options, then proofing, and choose the auto correct tab. Then AutoFormat As You Type. Untick 'Define styles based on your formatting'.

I've shown the relevant window in the picture.

However, you still have to unmess the captions. The quickest way to do this seems to be to select a piece of normal text, right click its style box, and choose update style to match selection.
Then watch your document map refresh itself back to what it should look like.

Numbering thesis paragraphs

I'm writing this blog while my Word crashes. :(

I thought I'd try again to number the sections within each chapter, like so
2 Literature review
2.1 Introduction
2.2 public sector procurement

I found instructions at http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/numbering20072010.html
and followed them down to modifying the style for my second level headings, where it has crashed. BANG, WALLOP! Silence.

Oh, bother! I'd really like to list my headings like this because I think it would make it easier to work out where you are in the middle of a long chapter.

Advanced word processing

My colleague's sitting next to me updating her references to her diagrams manually. She's checking each one and changing them in her 90,000 word long thesis. And she's writing up her contents manually. Yeuch. I showed her how to

• right click any new diagram,
• choose caption,
• add it in and
• check its style is 'caption' so it goes centre and with the required line spacing. Then I
• use insert cross reference to refer to the figure, and
• add the page number if it's a figure in an appendix.
• A quick scroll page (using view document map) to the list of figures in contents,
• right click and update. Yep - all forty figures fine.

But this is not the time to learn advanced features like this - learn them in third year and keep practising. Here's a link to a pdf from Durham University on "Creating Long Documents Using Microsoft Word 2007" - it looks useful, simple and short (20 pages).

I would like to learn and easily do chapter numbers in the way that I did twenty years ago with AmiPro. That was a nice word processing package.

My colleague says (tongue in cheek) this isn't all my own work - I've been too technology-assisted!