Writing Report Using MS Word
Writing Report Using MS Word
Version 1.2.2
Last modified: 26 August 2006
Prepared by:
Jason Pang
pangjason (at) gmail.com, jypang (at) uwaterloo.ca
Summary
Most people who write a lengthy report in Microsoft Word for the first time know how difficult it is – one has
to number the pages, label all the figures and tables, and so on. There are seemingly endless hoops to jump
through in order to make sure that your page numbering is correct, and to make sure all your figures and tables
are numbered properly, making sure all your references are in order and correct, and so on.
However, there are a number of ways around this. Assuming you don’t want to learn LaTeX, or any other
advanced tool for typesetting, there are still a number of ways to get Microsoft Word to behave nicely.
Report writing is a huge chore as it is – and there are a number of ways that you can make Word do a lot of
things for you. This guide will show you how to write a report using Microsoft Word while keeping yourself
sane.
Acknowledgements
University of Waterloo – Engineering Classes of 2009:
• 60” Joystick (Computer Engineering, Stream 8)
• Byte Me and RAM It (Computer Engineering, Stream 4)
• Erectronics (Electrical Engineering, Stream 4)
… for providing me the opportunity to teach them, and for putting up with me for the four months I was their
WEEF TA for. These classes provided the inspiration for me to write this document. If I hadn’t been a TA for
GenE 167 for these classes, I would never have bothered to write this document. I apologize that it’s probably
too late for the stream 4 classes (since this was first published in April 2005) to use this on your Work Term
Reports this term but hopefully it will help you on future reports.
Thanks also to the TAs who worked with me during the term, Zac Balson, Faye Boloorchi, David Li, and Matt
Strickland.
University of Waterloo – Computer Engineering Class of 2007 (Overcocked), for making me realize that there
are still people who don’t know how to use these tools, necessitating the need for this document to educate all.
And of course, thanks for simply being around in this insane world of Computer Engineering at the University
of Waterloo.
Finally, thanks to all the rest of you (see Revisions section) who are making further improvements (I hope!) to
this document.
Licence
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution License. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th
Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
Revisions
0.1 2004-11-01 Jason Pang - Started work on this document. Got to Section 2 before I got pre-
empted by ECE 150 and GenE 167 report marking.
0.2 2004-11-30 Jason Pang - Began work on it (again) but then realized I’d better start my study
of MSci 311 before I go ahead and fail the course. Also, had to mark ECE 150
assignments.
0.3 2004-12-20 Jason Pang - Work suspended indefinitely because I wanted to enjoy my break
back home in Hong Kong, and because I had to finish my own work term report,
which I had unwisely not started yet.
Table of Contents
Summary ............................................................................................................................................................ ii
Acknowledgements ........................................................................................................................................... iii
Licence............................................................................................................................................................... iv
Revisions............................................................................................................................................................. v
Table of Contents.............................................................................................................................................. vi
List of Figures ................................................................................................................................................. viii
List of Tables..................................................................................................................................................... ix
1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................................... 1
1.1 Purpose ................................................................................................................................................ 1
1.2 Scope ................................................................................................................................................... 1
1.3 This is a guide – not a manual!............................................................................................................ 1
1.4 Version used ........................................................................................................................................ 1
1.5 F1 – Help!............................................................................................................................................ 1
1.6 Improvements to this document .......................................................................................................... 1
1.7 Why this was written ........................................................................................................................... 2
1.8 A note about the audience ................................................................................................................... 2
1.9 A little trivia – and a tip for doing well ............................................................................................... 2
1.10 Disclaimer, and other such stuff .......................................................................................................... 2
2 Report Writing Hints and Tips ................................................................................................................ 4
2.1 General Report Writing ....................................................................................................................... 4
2.2 Style..................................................................................................................................................... 4
2.3 Spell checkers and grammar checkers................................................................................................. 5
2.4 General tips and hints .......................................................................................................................... 5
2.5 University of Waterloo ECE Department tip....................................................................................... 5
3 Setting up the Environment...................................................................................................................... 6
3.1 Why bother? ........................................................................................................................................ 6
3.2 Why do we do this? Aren’t automatic features helpful? ..................................................................... 6
3.3 Disabling Features in Microsoft Word ................................................................................................ 6
3.4 Setting up your view............................................................................................................................ 7
3.5 The Normal view vs. Print Layout view.............................................................................................. 8
4 Setting up Styles....................................................................................................................................... 10
4.1 Why bother? ...................................................................................................................................... 10
4.2 Setting it all up................................................................................................................................... 10
4.3 Defining a style of your own ............................................................................................................. 12
4.4 Using your styles ............................................................................................................................... 12
5 Splitting Sections ..................................................................................................................................... 13
5.1 Why bother? ...................................................................................................................................... 13
5.2 Solving the problem - Sections.......................................................................................................... 13
GenE 167 tip: The entry “Table of Contents” should not show up in the Table of Contents! However, at
times, I’m too lazy to fix it myself for the purposes of this report. You should fix it because your TAs
will catch it and will take marks off for it!
List of Figures
Figure 3-1: Partial Tools Menu ........................................................................................................................... 6
Figure 3-2: AutoFormat Options ......................................................................................................................... 6
Figure 3-3: AutoFormat As You Type Options................................................................................................... 7
Figure 3-4: Selecting Print Layout view ............................................................................................................. 8
Figure 3-5: Print layout view without paragraph marks...................................................................................... 8
Figure 3-6: Print layout view with paragraph marks ........................................................................................... 8
Figure 3-7: Print Layout view ............................................................................................................................. 9
Figure 3-8: Normal view ..................................................................................................................................... 9
Figure 4-1: Formatting Toolbar Showing Styles............................................................................................... 10
Figure 4-2: Styles Task Pane............................................................................................................................. 11
Figure 4-3: Modifying a Heading Style............................................................................................................. 11
Figure 5-1: Selecting a break type..................................................................................................................... 14
Figure 5-2: A new section number .................................................................................................................... 14
Figure 5-3: Inserting page numbers................................................................................................................... 14
Figure 5-4: Page Number Format dialog box.................................................................................................... 15
Figure 5-5: Editing Headers and Footers........................................................................................................... 16
Figure 6-1: Selecting the Caption feature.......................................................................................................... 17
Figure 6-2: Changing caption options ............................................................................................................... 18
Figure 6-3: Captioning a table........................................................................................................................... 19
Figure 7-1: Cross-reference dialog box ............................................................................................................. 20
Figure 7-2: Cross-reference dialog box for figures ........................................................................................... 21
Figure 7-3: Selecting Index and Tables............................................................................................................. 22
Figure 7-4: Creating a Table of Contents .......................................................................................................... 22
Figure 7-5: Updating Table of Contents............................................................................................................ 23
Figure 8-1: Footnote and Endnote window ....................................................................................................... 25
Figure 8-2: Document body after inserting reference ....................................................................................... 25
Figure 8-3: References section after inserting reference ................................................................................... 26
Figure 8-4: Endnotes screen .............................................................................................................................. 26
Figure 8-5: Endnotes screen after removing separator line ............................................................................... 26
List of Tables
Table 7-1: Result of different types of referencing ........................................................................................... 21
Table 9-1: Differences in sentence between using no spaces, half spaces, and full spaces for SI units............ 28
1 Introduction
1.1 Purpose
The purpose of this document is to provide a quick guide to how to use the features in Microsoft Word to
make report writing easier. This document hopes to familiarize the reader with aspects of Microsoft Word’s
referencing capabilities so that the reader does not eventually go insane keeping track of all the numbers that
will inevitably result by a report.
1.2 Scope
This manual is written for someone with reasonable computing background and at least familiar with aspects
of Microsoft Word. Therefore, you should know how to type, and terms like menu, toolbars, etc. are assumed
to be familiar to the reader. This document assumes that you know how to turn on a Windows-based (or Mac-
based) computer and use it. So you know how to click, drag, and select items using a mouse.
This document should apply to a Macintosh computer using Office X, but I can’t guarantee that.
1.5 F1 – Help!
The F1 button – the universal help button in Windows programs – is your friend. Use it if there are things you
don’t know how to do or if this guide isn’t clear. It doesn’t bite, hurt, or cost you any money (okay,
technically it does, but you’ve paid for it already, so you might as well use it). If you have a fear of little
animated paperclips, that’s understandable, and I assure you you’re not alone. It can actually be turned off
fairly easily, but that is beyond the scope of this document. You can press F1 to find out how to turn it off. ☺
This was intended to be done in time so that the Class of 2009 could use it for their first work term report.
However, this document got put on the backburner amid all the marking that had to be done, and I never had a
chance to finish it until the end of my Winter 2005 academic term.
Hopefully, this document will be a useful guide to students at the University of Waterloo and other
schools/universities to help them with their reports.
So the tip: keep your TAs sane. Diagrams are good. Conciseness is good. As much fun as it is to slap a 486
page tome on your teacher’s/TA’s lap - I’ve done it before, for an A-Level (Year 13) Computing project –
they probably won’t appreciate having to look at all of it.
Two cliché quotes come to mind: “A picture is worth a thousand words,” and “It’s quality, not quantity.” Both
very true, albeit very overused.
The author of this document will not be responsible for any injury, death, loss of hair, or any other
phenomenon natural or otherwise to befall the reader after reading this document. The author will not be
responsible for anything that happens to your computer as a result of reading this document, including, but not
limited to, damage by smashing, lightning, or viruses.
The author also cannot be responsible for anyone failing a course, failing a report, or losing marks due to this
document – please don’t use “but Jason said so!” as an excuse for not following the guidelines you are
supposed to follow.
The author has made all reasonable attempts to ensure that the document contains no viruses and will not
spread viruses to readers’ computers. However, if you obtained this document from someone who doesn’t
happen to be the author, then, well, that’s slightly dodgier (but read above, I’m still not responsible for it!)
2.2 Style
• Make your top-level headings a large size (in this document, they’re 16pt). Make your 2nd-level
headings at least 3 point sizes smaller than the top-level heading.
• In general, a document reads better if you use sans-serif fonts (e.g. Arial, Helvetica, Tahoma) for
headings, and serif fonts (e.g. Times New Roman, Georgia) for the main body.
• Use consistent fonts. Fonts should not abruptly change in the report. For example, use one font and
size for headings, one for the main body, one for captions, etc. Word generally does a good job of
doing this for you if you don’t change anything too drastically.
• Comic Sans MS is an evil font. Using it turns your otherwise brilliant report into something little
more than a comic strip without pictures. It also isn’t as pleasing to the eye as fonts like Helvetica.
• 1.5 spacing is generally a good spacing to make a report readable. You can actually get away with 1.3
in most cases, and it’ll still be relatively readable. Make sure it doesn’t violate the rules that govern
your particular report, though.
• If you need more space, decrease the margins of the page (File → Page Setup). Again, ensure it
doesn’t violate any rules governing your report.
• Leave a new line between paragraphs if they are not indented.
• The referencing style used in this document is the January 2004 edition of the Computer Society Style
Guide [2]. You may follow the style used in your textbook or the one used in this document – both are
valid for the purposes of a GenE 167 report (as of Fall 2004).
• Consistency is key! For example, in this list, you see that all the ends of sentences have periods.
Others in this document do not. This is bad style – stick to one convention, and don’t deviate.
Similarly, table entries should either all have periods, or not.
• There should never, ever be a report section titled “Report Body.” That’s just plain wrong.
• There should not be a “Table of Contents” entry in the Table of Contents.
4. Next, in the AutoFormat As You Type tab, you should disable all the features listed under Apply As
You Type. The settings should roughly match the settings shown in Figure 3-3.
What you just did was to disable some of the more annoying things in Word that will drive you nuts when you
proceed to prepare a more complicated report. However, despite setting all this up, there will still be times
when Word tries to be smart. What this means is that you will have to be ever-vigilant to outsmart Word.
One useful tool that many people overlook is the ability to view formatting marks in your document. This
shows where all the spaces in the documents are, page breaks, and any other weird and wonderful formatting
you have done with your document. This transforms your view of the document from this (Figure 3-5):
The thing to keep in mind about Word is that it is a digital typesetter – it will try its best to handle all the
layouts and stuff for you, and you just have to sort of trust it to do so. Micromanaging the thing won’t help,
and in many cases, it will turn out very badly.
But if you use the Normal view (Figure 3-8), it allows you more of an objective look at the document, without
much of the fanciness of the “Print Layout” view - for example, headers/footers are hidden. The other thing
that is useful is that you can see where your page and section breaks are located at a glance.
That being said, I still prefer the “Print Layout” view over “Normal” since things look prettier.
Hint: you may want to use the “Normal” view to do your section breaks and stuff. It’s just easier that
way.
4 Setting up Styles
Another way to think about styles is simply to think about formatting your text normally in Word, except
instead of applying it to only a certain block of text, you’ll be applying it to all similar blocks of text
throughout your document. For example, if I wanted to change my heading fonts from Arial to Verdana, I can
change them all in one go by changing the style (assuming all my headings follow the “Heading 1” style)
Point of Interest: All of Word’s formatting is based on styles. If you make something in your document
bold, it creates a style “bold” style automatically.
Your window will now have a toolbar (or “Task Pane,” by Microsoft terminology) on the right hand side, with
all your current styles shown. Clicking on a style will apply the style to the current paragraph the cursor is on,
and you can change the style by right-clicking on the style and clicking “Modify.” You can see this in action
in Figure 4-2.
Note: The styles can also be accessed as a pull-down menu next to the “Styles and Formatting” button
(see Figure 4-1).
Now, say I want to change the Heading 2 style from the (boring) Arial font to Tahoma. This can be achieved
by right-clicking the corresponding style and choosing “Modify” from the menu. This will bring up the dialog
box shown in Figure 4-3. The intricacies on how to modify fonts and font styles will be left to the reader.
It is strongly recommended that a style for numbering is set up now. You can do so by clicking on the
“Numbering” item in the menu shown in Figure 4-3, and then by selecting your favourite numbering style in
the Numbered tab. This should be done for all the heading styles that are defined in your document.
In order to do this,
1. Click on the “New Style” button (above the listing of styles).
2. Make the new style “based on” (third drop-down box from the top in the dialog box) Heading 1 - see
Figure 4-3.
3. Disable the numbering (Format → Numbering).
4. Give the new style a meaningful name.
5. Set it up so that the “Style for the following paragraph” is Normal.
Note: It is imperative that you consistently label your major headings as “Heading 1” and your minor
headings as “Heading 2” or “Heading 3.” It will become apparent when you do your table of contents
(Chapter 7) why you need to do so.
Right now, this stuff seems like unnecessary overhead – especially when you’re trying to get to actual work
doing your report. However, this will all pay off in the end, I promise.
5 Splitting Sections
In my term as a TA, I have seen various weird and wonderful ways of getting around this problem. For
example, front matter and body material are kept in separate files, and the title page and letter of submittal is
kept in yet another file in order to keep the numbering straight. The table of contents are done manually, as
are the list of tables and figures – a right pain if you have more than a handful of tables and figures. Another
method was to do all the numbering by hand in the form of text boxes.
Aside: one of the more interesting solutions to the problem I’ve seen is page numbers being printed out,
then (physically) cut and pasted into the document, and the resulting document photocopied. So each
page looked like it had a printed page number, but in fact the person had spent hours (probably) putting
the numbers in. The only part that gave it away was that one of the page numbers was half-folded when
it was copied, so I saw the shadow plus the awkwardly covered number.
Hint: You may want to temporarily switch to “Normal” view while you do your sectioning. It’s just
easier that way. (On the menu: View → Normal)
2. Instead of making a new page for the new “section,” select Insert → Break… from the menu bar. You
will see a dialog box similar to the one shown in Figure 5-1.
4. Click OK. The first section will have page numbers inserted.
5. Go to your new section, and select Insert → Page Number from the menu bar again.
6. This time, instead of clicking OK, click Format...
7. You will see a dialog box shown like in Figure 5-4. Notice the drop down list (highlighted as a 1) in
the figure. This box allows you to select a numbering style for the current section.
8. However, note item 2 in Figure 5-4. It allows you to “Continue [page numbering] from previous
section” or “Start at:” – this allows you to set up a new section’s numbering system!
Recall: Headers and footers are bits of text (or anything, for that matter) that appear at the top and bottom
(respectively) of every page.
To modify your headers and footers, select View → Header and Footer from the menu bar. Alternatively, if
you have already defined headers and/or footers, double-clicking on the header or footer will allow you to edit
it.
Once you’re editing the header and footer, you will see the Header and Footer toolbar, and you will be able to
change the text in your headers and footers. There are a few things that I would like to highlight that are
special to headers and footers in sections, shown below in Figure 5-5.
If this section’s header/footer is not “Linked to Previous,” then you can change your header and footer for this
section. And that’s it! You’ve learnt how to use sections to your advantage!
Remember: page numbering inserted by using Insert → Page Numbers… is just another element in the header
or footer. If you unlink it (i.e. disable “same as previous”) then you can delete the page numbering from one
section while keeping it intact in another.
Hint: In case you haven’t figured out where to apply this, think Letter of Submittal and Title Page.
Note: Here is where things should start falling into place about why we defined the Heading 1’s. If
you notice in Figure 6-2, there is a selection saying “Chapter starts with style.” This means that the
chapter number (i.e. in this example, the “6” in “Figure 6-2”) is derived from the number of the
Note: The IEEE referencing guide requires that tables must have their captions above, and figures
below [2]. Be sure you have followed this convention (if you’re writing using the IEEE style).
The procedure for captioning tables is similar. It’s recommended that you select the entire table, right click it,
and then select “Caption.” The procedure then follows exactly the same as that for captioning images.
However, make sure that you put your caption for your table in the correct place!
Note: Okay, sometimes it’s not quite as automatic as that. You may have to select the entire document,
and then press F9 to update all the captions.
Here is where the fun begins, though. Word’s cross-referencing features are truly amazing, in that they are
(basically) fully automatic! In this chapter we’ll step through how to cross-reference material in the document.
And it’s actually a lot simpler than it seems.
4. Let’s say we wanted to reference a figure. Figure 7-2 below shows an example of the numbered items
available for you to reference (the list is actually from this document).
7. And that’s it! You’ve made a reference to another object! Now, if the order of the figures changes,
you the caption will be updated automatically to reflect the change in numbering.
Note: In order to insert a cross-reference to anything, the figure has to be in the document and captioned
already. Therefore you have to insert your images/tables before you caption, and make sure you refer to
the table by number in the text before it appears.
You’ll probably have to play around with all the different things you can do with this tool in order to fully
grasp everything that can be done.
That really is all there is to it. You can repeat the steps above to get a list of figures and list of tables inserted.
You will find that sometimes, page numbers do not get updated automatically after inserting a new figure.
When this happens, this is what needs to be done:
1. Select everything in the document (press Ctrl + A, or from the menu: Edit → Select All)
2. Press F9.
Occasionally you will encounter the text: “Error! Reference source not found” in your document. This
means that the image or table that you referenced was deleted, and therefore no reference to it can exist any
more. You should check your document for these errors before printing out your final copy to ensure you’re
not left with embarrassing reference not found errors in your document.
You can do a regular search (by selecting Edit → Find from the menu) for this text to see any errors resulting
from deleted references.
8 References
Note: This document is written primarily with University of Waterloo students in mind. In any case, at
any school or university, plagiarism is a big no-no and one must take care to ensure that other peoples’
work is properly acknowledged. The relevant policy for the University of Waterloo is Policy 71, which
can be found at http://www.adm.uwaterloo.ca/infosec/Policies/policy71.htm
Note: The referencing style used for this document is based on the IEEE Computer Society style guide
[2]. Another popular style used is APA [3], which will have a different referencing style.
1. Once you’ve set up your new section, we can now add our first reference. You will want to create a
new page by pressing Ctrl + Enter. This will give you a new page to work with.
2. Next, using your style created in Section 4.3, create the “References” heading, and press Enter after
typing that.
3. Here comes the fun part – you will now add your first reference! First of all, go to the place where
you want to insert your reference.
4. From the menu, select Insert → Reference → Footnote. The window shown in Figure 8-1 will appear.
Congratulations! You have now made your first reference in Word. However, you must be sure that you place
the square brackets (e.g. [1]) around the numbers in accordance with IEEE style. Now, in your references
section, you can go and change the text following the number.
Finally, if you need to reference the endnote (remember – a reference is an endnote in Word terminology)
again, then you can simply follow what you did to reference figure/table captions:
1. Select Insert → Reference → Cross-reference from the menu bar
2. Select your Reference type to be “Endnote”
3. Select the Insert reference to to be “Endnote number”
4. Click Insert.
9 SI Units
According to your textbook, Introduction to Professional Engineering (Andrews, Aplevich, Fraser, & Ratz),
half-spaces are preferred to full spaces when separating the number from the unit. In LaTeX and mathematics
packages, such as MathType, you can put in the half spaces as required.
However, given that you’re reading this document, you probably don’t know how to use LaTeX or don’t want
to bother to learn how.
Table 9-1: Differences in sentence between using no spaces, half spaces, and full spaces for SI units
Type Sample sentence
No space The quick brown fox jumped over the 1A power supply and 3Ω resistor.
Half-space The quick brown fox jumped over the 1 A power supply and 3 Ω resistor.
Full space The quick brown fox jumped over the 1 A power supply and 3 Ω resistor.
Although you don’t quite notice it, the half-spaced version is more readable than the full space version
especially in a long block of text.
And that’s it! Nicely half-spaced units – your TAs will thank you for it.
If you have any suggestions and/or improvements that can be made to this document, please email me at the
email address on the front cover of this document. I’d be very glad to hear from you. If you have found this
document useful, you can also drop me a line – it’s always nice to know that your work is appreciated. ☺
Finally, I’ll present some of the quirks in Word that might drive you nuts in the final two sections. They’re not
in the appendix because:
• This is good reading anyway.
• I’m too lazy to fix the sections to include it as an appendix.
• This is the fastest way to present the information.
• I’m tired.
If you have any comments, please email me. My contact information is located on the front cover of this
document.
References