A basic guide to Microsoft Word (part two)

Indexes
Longer documents can benefit from an index and a table of contents. The latter occurs at the beginning of the document and Word will automatically update the page numbers as the document is edited.

To mark a word for inclusion in the index, select it, click on the Insert menu, then Reference and Index and Tables.

Click on the Index tab and then on the Mark Entry button. You can either mark each instance of the word individually by clicking on the Mark button, or click on the Mark All for every instance of the word to be included in the index.

Once this has been done, scroll through the document to mark other entries.

Select the word using the mouse and click back in the Mark Index Entry window. The word will then automatically be entered into the Main entry box, ready for you to choose either Mark or Mark All.

Once the entries have been marked, the next step is to create the index at the end of the document.

Scroll to the bottom of the document and press Ctrl and Return together to start a new page. Click on the Insert menu, select Reference and then Index and Tables.

Click on the Index tab if it is not already visible. To show the index with the page numbers set to the right of the column, check the box labelled ‘Right align page numbers’. Click on the OK button to create the index.

Word chooses the headings for the contents page by selecting text that has had one of its Heading styles applied to it, because these styles often indicate new parts of a document, such as a new chapter in a story.

Select the text of the headings you want to appear in the table of contents and apply the style Heading 1, Heading 2 or Heading 3. Now move the cursor to the place in the document where you want the table to appear.

Click on the Insert menu, then Reference and then click on Index and Tables. Select the Table of Contents tab and then click on OK to insert the table.

Importing from other documents
Word can accept information from other programs on the computer and insert it into a document.

There are two ways this can be done: Linking and Inserting (unhelpfully, in Word’s Help files Inserting is often referred to as Embedding, the original name for this feature).

With Linking, a link to a file in question is created (be it a picture or table), and Word loads it from its original location on the hard disk every time the Word document is opened for editing. Any changes that have been made to that file since Word last opened it are then updated.

Unless you expect the file to change on a regular basis, it is much better to insert a file into a Word document than to use Linking.

The simplest example of this is inserting an image into a document. Move the cursor to the line where the picture should appear and click on the Insert menu, Picture and then From File.

Locate the file you wish to include, click on it once and then click on the Insert button. If you wish to link to the picture, click on the small down arrow on the right-hand side of the Insert button and click on Link to File.

The image will now be placed on the page. To adjust the size of the picture, click in the middle of it once so that a frame appears around it with black squares at each corner and in the middle of the frame line.

Click and drag on these squares to change the size of the picture. Use the squares on the corners to keep the proportions of the image.

The other important aspect of including an image in a document is the way the text flows around it. Right-click in the middle of the image and select Format Picture.

Click on the Layout tab and select one of the Wrapping styles. The example picture for each choice explains how the text interacts with the picture.