HOW TO WRITE A THESIS IN WORD?

October 2002, by Dani Schmid written for OFFICE2k and Mathtype 5 on WIN2k

Personal knowledge and taste should be the guideline to decide which software package should be used to write a diploma or PhD thesis, or any other kind of long document. The differences between LaTeX, FRAMEMAKER, WORD, and similar packages do not matter as long as the user knows how to use the software. This article is a guideline how to do it in WORD. WORD is often under the suspicion that it cannot handle large documents, especially if a lot of pictures and equations are involved. This is not true, as long as certain rules are respected.

DEFINE THE LAYOUT 1. PAGE LAYOUT The first point that the ambitious writer has to take into account is that certain layout basics are set up before the first word is written. So open a new document and off we go. The ETH generally requires that the page format is A4 and that the top boundary is 2.5cm and all others 3cm, which can be adjusted under FilePage Setup. While we are at it you may also want to click

2. TEXT STYLES Now we already need define the fonts and styles for the headings, main text, etc. Therefore write in your document

2 Heading 1 Heading 2 Heading 3 Heading 4 Heading 5 Body text blablabla

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Then you highlight the first line and choose Heading 1 as its style from the corresponding box in the icon bar at the top. Maybe it says Body Text at the moment, which is the actual formatting. You can also define the style under FormatStyle. Assign all other lines to their style. Most likely you are not happy with this layout. WORD provides some other style sets. You can find them under FormatThemeStyle Gallery. Just select different styles and see how your document changes in the preview pane. If the preview is not updated when you change the style then switch in the bottom left Preview box between Example and Document. If you found a style that you are approximately happy with, say Ok otherwise you can also Cancel. Now you have to do the fine-tuning. Lets say you want your Heading 1 to be in a different font. Just highlight the Heading 1 line and choose your favorite font from the font menu. Then you define the Heading 1 line again as Heading 1. Now WORD will ask you the following:

You have to choose the Update... option the change the style. Like this you can define all styles to match your taste. You can also highlight an text line and define the style through FormatStyleModify.

HOW TO WRITE A THESIS IN WORD?

3. HEADER & FOOTER With the styles defined, the last remaining layout task is the definition of a header and/or footer. If you want a header that indicates the chapter and maybe has a line going from left to right etc. youll need to redefine the page top margin to 3cm so that the header does violate the 2.5cm minimum distance. It is important that you define these things now, because it will influence the way you arrange stuff on the pages afterwards and saves you a lot of time doing the final layout. Then go to ViewHeader and Footer. Since we have defined a different layout for even and odd pages we have to define two separate sets. Play around with the page numbers and stuff. If you want a line to cross the printable area you have to click the page setup icon when you are in the header, then LayoutBorderHorizontal Line.

4. SAVE YOUR LAYOUT AS A DOCUMENT TEMPLATE If you are happy with the layout you have to save the document now as a template. Go to FileSave As, select Document Template (*.dot), name the template something like my_thesis and save. This will automatically save your new template in the template folder. Close your document and go to FileNew and choose my_thesis.dot. This will open a new document that has the formatting which you just defined.

ORGANIZING THE FILE STRUCTURE If you have a lot of pictures, equations, and tables it is preferable to have separate documents for all chapters. However, with increasing computer speeds WORD can handle hundreds and sometimes thousand of pages. However, the handling will become complicated if you do this. Under no circumstances make a master document. Master documents do not work and destroy all of your sub-files. Just have a look on google

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groups. It is anyways a good practice to consult google groups and see what problems other people have faced with WORD. I suggest that you make a folder THESIS. In this folder you have the directories CHAPTER1, CHAPTER2, etc. Each of these chapter folders contains only one word file (e.g., chapter_1.doc) and always the same set of subdirectories, e.g., PIC, PIC_SOURCES, MOVIES, MATLAB, MAPLE, DATA. It is advantageous to use such a simplified structure without complicated names, because this assures that, for example, burning backup CDs will be trouble free. The use of the subdirectories is to contain all the data that was used for each chapter, so that it can be reproduced at any time. The PIC_SOURCES folder should contain your ILLUSTRATOR/COREL etc. files, while the PIC folder contains the actual pictures that are linked into the file (cf. section Pictures). Like this you can, for example, have redundant file names (e.g., you can have a setup.tif in every chapter) and you can maintain a better overview over what belongs where. Another advantage is that if you would like to publish a chapter as a paper you can easily save it somewhere else, change the layout, and extract the pictures.

PICTURES Link the pictures! To insert the pictures go to InsertPictureFrom File, choose your file from the PIC folder, and under Link select Link to file. This avoids WORD files that kill any computer once they are big enough. Instead, the files remain small and whenever the picture file in the PIC folder is updated word will also update the picture in the document (to force this click the picture one time and press F9, which is the refresh button). Generally compressed TIFF files are suggested as the picture format. TIFF compresses loss less and ILLUSTRATOR and any other graphic program can write it, and WORD knows how to handle them. Dont exaggerate the resolution of the pictures; normally 300dpi (color) or 600dpi (black/white) is plenty and should not be exceeded (in fact much less is also ok, try it).

HOW TO WRITE A THESIS IN WORD?

The picture numbering is done through the InsertCaption option. This will add captions to the pictures and automatically update the figure number. If you need to refer to a figure in your text go to InsertCross-reference, select

This also explains how to do any other kind of cross-referencing. The resulting crossreference is a hyperlink and will be translated as such if you make PDFs or HTML files. You can force word to adjust the text to float around pictures and fancy stuff like this. For example, you may be tempted to make a textbox, position it somewhere, anchor it, and put the caption into it as well. Youll regret that you did that. Such kind of pictures will not be counted anymore properly in the figure numbering, they will be all over the place because the anchors dont work, and may not show up in automatic indices. Just insert your pictures as described above, break the main text, put the caption, and continue the main text. If you need two pictures side a side use tabs. If you want to try something fancy, then insert a table and put the picture in there. Then you can play with the size of the cells and put the caption into another cell and arrange it. This works hassle free.

6 EQUATIONS

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Get Mathtype! And read the help file concerning equation numbering and referencing. Its easy. However, WORD and Mathtype together can make troubles. Lets say Word crashes. Then you have to check if the Word process is actually gone. Press Ctrl-ShiftEsc and check under processes if WINWORD.EXE is still there. If yes End Process Tree through a right-click. Now you will have to clean up the mess that Word left in a temp directory, which is usually under C:\Documents and Settings\YOUR_USER_NAME\Local Settings\Temp Youll find a lot of files in there that you can all delete. Only if you clean up Word will continue to work at acceptable speeds and not crash. This cleaning up may even be necessary if you do not work with Mathtype but WORD crashes or is very slow. Concerning this also have a look at http://www.mathtype.com/support/TSN/tsn83.stm#remove If you use Mathtype you may also encounter problems saving the document. Some strange memory or Disk full message will appear. This is because some equation codes got corrupted. This happens if you copy paste equations or inline Mathtype expressions. Try to avoid this. If you are too lazy to retype an equation, mark the equation, copy it, choose the insert equation button, Mathtype opens empty and you can paste the copied equation into Mathtype, close it and youll have a fine Mathtype expression. A sign for the mentioned problem are empty boxes instead of equations. You can try to mark the boxes and choose MathtypeConvert EquationsConvert. If this does not restore the equation youll have to delete the box. So, if you cannot save the document, then look for empty boxes and try to convert them. Alternatively you can look for error messages in the text and delete them (and the related Mathtype expressions). If you still cannot save you may mark the entire document and try the Mathtype convert option. However, this sometimes seems to have problems with figure captions and Endnote references that are also field codes.

HOW TO WRITE A THESIS IN WORD?

REFERENCES/BIBLIOGRAPHY If you dont use Endnote I cannot help you!

WORD SETTINGS - SURVIVE CRASHES The following option-set under ToolsOptionsSave works well:

Under Spelling & Grammar I would active the Check spelling as you type and the Check grammar as you type.

8 HOW TO MAKE ONE BIG FILE

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If the big day is approaching youll have to make one big file out of everything you wrote. Chapter, figure, and page numbering can be made continuous throughout the files by just manually adjusting the starting numbers for every document. Yet, youll also need a table of contents, which is quite some work if you do it by hand. Therefore do the following. In your THESIS directory make a new blank word file. In this word file you write { rd C:\\THESIS\\CHAPTER1\\chapter1.doc } { rd C:\\THESIS\\CHAPTER2\\chapter2.doc } { rd C:\\THESIS\\CHAPTER3\\chapter3.doc } etc. These are field codes that tell word that there are more files. You have to create the strange brackets by pressing Ctrl-F9, only then you make a code field! Add all your files in this manner and then you go to InsertIndex and TablesTable of Contents, choose your style and the number of heading levels you want in the TOC and off you go. If you did everything right WORD will now go through all your sub-files and create one TOC. Now you have everything you need: Title page, TOC, all the chapters, acknowledgements, etc. Go through all these files and make a PDF file out of every one of them by AcrobatConvert to Adobe PDF. For this you need the full Acrobat package installed, not just the reader. Once you have all the PDF files you can merge them in the actual Acrobat program and you have the big file, which you can print and send around.

MORE SOPHISTICATION The field codes used above can be used to generate automatic continuous page numbering and related things. However, youll need to program macros for this or find some on the net. Google found some for me, but they didnt work 100%, which is why I dont post them here.

HOW TO WRITE A THESIS IN WORD?

A very important thing to learn when working with long, complicated documents are the special key combinations of WORD. The complete list can be found under http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=KB;EN-US;Q211982& Most important are the F9 combinations, which allow you to see the field codes, update pictures, etc. A very good WORD site can be found under http://www.mvps.org/word Once you are through their FAQs youll be a specialist.