5. Techniques

5.1 Formatting Texts with Word

5.1.1 Formatting - General

	The format of your Word documents is the sum of all the instructions the computer needs to put letters or symbols, or embedded graphics, or ... at the right place, in the right font, and so on.
		The format of your document is something you can and should chose. If you fail to do so, your document will still have a format - the default option that the PC picks for you. This is the format stored in the "Normal.dot (globale Vorlage)". If you are familiar with HTML, the normal.dot is something like the "style sheet" used for formatting HTML documents.
	Working with the possibilities of formatting Word is extremely tricky and contains a lot pitfalls and dangers. Never, ever, for example, enable options like "automatisch aktualisieren" if you don't know exactly what you are doing because it may mean that all word.doc files in your PC will suddenly no longer look like you had made them to look, but completely different. All of them - because you may have changed the Normal.dot that is their formatting base.
	Nevertheless, you should use the more simpler formatting options because they make life easier.
		We will just look at it in a practical way and give a few hints here and there.

Formatting Text

Always switch on the

icon, the "Absatzmarker" as it is called German. It not only makes some other formatting signs appear on the screen but also allows you to check the formatting of the "Absatz" or paragraph.

In order to do that, you simply highlight the

in your text and look at the Word menu (where you have enabled the "Format" Menu part). For the camera-ready manuscript your are supposed to use, this looks like this:

In the window marked, you now see the format selected for this paragraph; it is aptly called "Titel". Obviously, this is just a suitable name for all the specifics or attributes defining the format "Title". The question thus is what are those attributes and how can I change them if I want to do this? (Note: Since you are to follow this format you actually do not want to change these specifications!)

Click on "Format" in the Word menu. This is what you get:

You see that "Titel" is activated; you also see all the other options you have in the underlying .dot (not necessarily your "Normal.dot" but one that comes with this particular .doc and is "hidden" inside. The field "Beschreibung" tells you, what is behind the "Titel" format, i.e. what are its attributes.

Now you have four options to change what the format "Titel" should do: "Organisieren...", "Neu....", "Bearbeiten..." and ""Löschen". That there are no "..." after "Löschen" (= Delete") should warn you that if you hit that button. you are in trouble, whereas for all other buttons a new menu will open up.

You can try the first three buttons and look at what you get. If you don't know exactly the meaning of "Organisieren..." and "Neu....", do not do anything - you will quite likely get yourself into trouble.

You might use "Bearbeiten..." because this allows you (with the button "Format") to change whatever you have in the "Beschreibung", e.g. the font.

Now look at the format behind other

signs. You will notice two things:

1. There are many other paragraph formats in this template - "Author", "Abstract", "Standard", and so on. However, you will also see that it is a badly formatted document, because the format of "2 PREPARING THE MANUSCRIPT" is "Umschlagabsenderadresse" whereas it is "Standard" for 1 and 3. Both are wrong, it should have been "Überschrift 1" or "Überschrift 2", for example (but with attributes different from what you get from the "Normal.dot")

What this tells you is that it is perfectly possible to have the actual document appear as you want it to look like with many different formats. To make things worse, you can even do that in many different ways: You could, for example, have the format "Überschrift 1" (specified in your default normal.dot as "Arial, 16 pt, fett, ...) change with the "Format", "Bearbeiten" menus to attributes that are what you want, e.g. make it look like "Standard" text, or you just change what you don't like right with the many keys you have in the "Format" menu bar as shown below:

2. The format of most (but not all) text blocks is "Standard". It specifies the attributes. There is, however, no "bold" in the attribute list, yet we have some words appearing Bold in the text.

This is, of course, what you get if you just select those words in the text and hit the "bold" icon (or "italics", or underlined, or...)

In other word, there is a complex hierarchy of formatting instructions (the experts talk about "shading"). Your icons in the format menu bar always override anything specified in the normal.dot or in the specification you may have made just for that paragraph. This makes formatting very powerful and very dangerous for amateurs (» 99.999 % of Word users).

The safe thing to do, of course, is to format the paragraphs correctly and use as little overrides as possible.

Why should one use correct formatting? To demonstrate just one out of many reasons, you now do a little exercise:

Take your Word template, then first save it under a different name. Now format the headlines properly (Mark all of , e.g. "2 PREPARING THE MANUSCRIPT" and assign it "Überschrift 1"; use "Überschrift 2" for 2.2 and so on.

Now move the whole text down by clicking two returns above the headline and mark the top one

Next, click on "Einfügen" in the menu, activate "Index und Verzeichnisse" und klick on "Inhaltsverzeichnis", This is what you should get:

Aha!!!. With proper formatting you can use a lot of automatic functions. Besides generating an Index, you can, for example, keep automatically track of footnotes and references, and so on.

If you once had to rewrite a list of 87 references because you had to insert an additional one at place 8 (the referee requested it!), which means that all numbers n above 8 had to be changed to n +1, you appreciate those functions!

Finally, the most important question: What kind of format should you use for just plain text?

You might think that "Standard" is the answer. That is not bad, but "Standard carries a minimum number of attributes, because it is the base oft many other formats. It only specifies the absolute necessities that you usually want to keep in all other formats.

When you write standard text, however, you want a little bit more, in particular you want some "Einzug" (indent), and that's why you are better of with the format "Standardeinzug".

Inserting Pictures or Graphics

What's the difference between a picture, photography or image and a graphic or drawing ? That will be addressed in chapter 5.2, so here we only worry about insert such an object into a Word document. To make things short, just a few essential rules.

1. Insert whatever you are inserting into a table.

Make a table with one row and one column, click on "Format", "Rahmen und Schattierungen" and then on "Ohne" - and nobody willl see your table. However, you now know exactly where you object will be in the text - inside the table, as part of the text.

With "Tabelleneigenschaften" and "Zelle" you can easily specify the kind of embedding of your table in the text - far easier than if you try that for your object directly

2. Never ever insert pictures or graphics by "copy" and "paste" !

All kinds of unpleasant things can happen; if you send our your paper to a Journal, you almost certainly will get it back with the request to use proper formats.

3. Always insert pictures or graphics by either:

3.1 Using "Einfügen" (main menu), "Graphik", "Aus Datei". Use "Tabelleneigenschaften" ; "Zelle", "Ausrichtung" to format your table. Try the various options if you are unsure!

3.2 Copy whatever you have on some other program on your PC. Then click on "Bearbeiten" on the main menu, and then "Inhalte einfügen" You will now be given a choice of formats. Pick the right one! (In case of doubt "Geräteunabhängiges Bitmap"). Why an "Einfügen" (= insert) option is not under "Einfügen" in the main menu, but under "Bearbeiten" is one of those Windows mysteries that will vex generations to come.

3.3 To make sure that your picture stays in the proper cell of the table at the proper place, now mark the picture and doubleclick on it. In the "Grafik formatiern" Menu coming up, click on "Layout" and on (Mostly) on "Mit Text in Zeile".

If you do it in any other way, changes are that you will curse a lot!

That's all there is to insertions of graphics and images into a word document. The only problem remaining is that whatever you inserted is mostly not the right size. There is an easy fix and a more complicated one that will be discussed to some extent in chapter 5.2

Just change the size of your picture by clicking on it and making it larger or smaller. But make sure that you don't just change one dimension. Use the erase

to cut of parts of a picture that you don't need.. All in all it looks like this:

OK - enough of that. There is no end to formatting Word. There is only one more absolutely essential rule:

Do not - repeat: do not - use Word for really long scientific texts with lots of embedded objects, equations, footnotes and so on; e.g. for you theses - Bachelor, Master, Ph.D. and so on. If you need more than, let's say, 25 - 30 pages, either make several documents (e.g. each chapter is a separate Word file) or use some better program for this (i.e. Latex or Tech). Chances are that you are going to be very unhappy if you do not heed this advice!