Working with Long Documents in Word 2013

Microsoft 2013 provides several tools for working with Long Documents, such as Styles, a Navigation Pane, Multi-level Lists, Tables of Contents, and Outline View.

Styles are useful because they allow for the creation of various Headings and Sub-Headings that contain certain portions of the text.

The Navigation Pane allows for easy movement between Headings and Sub-Headings.

Word allows users to create a Table of Contents for Long Documents, simplifying the structure of the document.

In addition to the Navigation Pane, Multi-level Lists and Outline View are alternative layouts for examining a document in general, structural terms.

Watch the free video here, transcripts for the entire video follow:

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Video transcripts:

Welcome back to our course on Word 2013. In this section, we’re going to look at some of the main aspects of dealing with long documents. The document we’re going to use as an example is just under 20 pages long, so it’s not particularly long, but we can use it to demonstrate all of the main features and tools that you might need when you’re dealing with a long document. So let’s get started.

Now as is often the case with long documents, this one’s got quite a bit of technical content on it. It’s about computer databases actually. It’s quite an old document but it’s still relevant today. And one of the most important things about long documents, in fact the way that virtually everybody approaches long documents is that they structure a document using styles. Now we’ve dealt with styles already earlier in the course. If I take one of the early pages of this document, let’s say here, and click on the very heavily bold word there Objectives. Go to the Home tab, I can see that it’s Heading style 1. And in fact, the main sections of this document are all begun with a Heading style 1 entry. So that one, Designing a Database is also Heading style 1. Now within that there are various lower level parts of the document that are marked as Heading level 2. So if I move further down here, Designing your Table, that’s a Heading 2 style, and it’s the use of those styles that gives the document its structure.

Earlier on in the course, we looked at the Navigation Pane and I’d like to look at the Navigation Pane again now. So if we click on View and enable Navigation Pane in the Show Group, the Navigation Pane appears on the left and one of the three options which we looked at earlier on but we couldn’t actually use earlier on was Headings. And you can see now how the headings of this particular document work. The Heading level 1’s are the left most ones in the list and the Heading level 2’s are indented one level from there. So this on, Online Help, must be a Heading level 2. Designing your Table, that’s Heading level 2 as well. Now, within that there are then some Heading level 3’s; so we’ve got Fields, Field Sizes, Field Types. So you can see in this summary how the structure of the document works.

This also shows you how you can use the Navigation Pane to navigate around this long document because if I click on one of the headings, I can go straight to that point in the document. So for instance, if I wanted to go to Getting Reports, I go down to the Navigation Pane and click on Getting Reports, it takes me there in the document. If I wanted to go to Fields within Designing your Table, I click on Fields and it takes me there. Note by the way that if I click on Fields in the actual text of the document, go to the Home tab, I can see that it is a Heading 3 styled paragraph. I know it’s only one line but it’s still a paragraph and it’s Heading 3 styled.

Now when you’re navigating your way around a document, particularly a very long document using the Navigation Pane and the styles, you may have literally hundreds of headings of various levels shown in the Navigation Pane and it’s often very useful to be able to collapse those headings so that you can see more. So for instance here in Creating a Simple Database, I’ve got two Heading level 2’s. Each of the Heading level 2’s has got some Heading level 3’s. I could collapse either of the Heading 2’s to make myself a little bit more space in the Navigation Pane or in fact, I could collapse the whole of Creating a Simple Database and just show the Heading level 1. The fact that there is a little arrow, a little wedge next to it tells me that there’s some other heading levels within that Heading level 1 and I can investigate that further if I need to.

Now I’d like to demonstrate something else here alongside this. This is another one of the new features in Word 2013 and it’s not strictly to do with the Navigation Pane, but it very closely mirrors what we’ve just seen. Within the body of a document if you hover over one of the headings, you’ll see a little wedge, a little arrow there, and you can actually collapse a Heading level section of a document here just by clicking on that arrow, and this hides the content. Of course, it doesn’t delete anything and anybody who wants to see that content again would just click on the wedge, click on the arrow again. But it’s very useful when you’re looking at a very long document and you just want to focus on one part. You can even use this approach when you ask other people to review the document. You can basically collapse the parts you don’t particularly want them to read and just leave expanded the parts you do.

If you right click on a heading, you have as one of the menu options on the contextual menu Expand/Collapse and from Expand/Collapse, you can say expand heading if it’s collapsed or collapse heading if it’s expanded. You can also say expand all headings or collapse all headings. This is within the document itself. This is not in the Navigation Pane. So that’s a great way when you’re dealing with a long document of collapsing the bits you’re not particularly interested in at the moment and it can make the whole of a very long document seem a bit less daunting if you can have most of it collapsed and just see the bit you’re working on at the moment. As I say that’s one of the new features in Word 2013.

Now one thing you may want to do when you’re working with a long document is to number the sections of the document, maybe just number the chapter or number the sections within the chapters. Let’s suppose for a very straightforward example of this I just decide I want to number these chapters. There’s a very straightforward way of doing this in Word 2013. All you need to do is to go to the Styles Group on the Home tab, and within that if you right click on Heading 1 which is basically the style that’s used on the Heading level 1’s, one of the option there is modify. Click on modify. You get up with this modify style where you can change all sorts of things about this particular style. The one we’re going to change is the numbering system. So if I just click on the bottom here where it says format, one of the options there is numbering. At the moment, there is no numbering. It says None. All I’m going to do is to put numbers on each chapter, 1, 2, 3, with a full stop with a point. Click on OK, click on OK, and now you notice that Headings level 1 now has a style which includes the number of the chapter at the beginning. Now, of course, if you scroll through the document, you’ll see that those numbers have been applied to the name of every chapter where it begins. And also, of course, if you look in the Navigation Pane, you can see that the numbering has appeared on the Navigation Pane.

Now in many situations, you may want to number at a lower level as well. So if you take Chapter 6, Creating a Simple Database, you may want it to say 6.1 Designing your Table, 6.2 Setting Up your Table, and maybe even at the lower level 6.1.1 Fields and so on. Now to do this, you use pretty much the same approach we’ve just made in principle, but it gets a bit more complicated when you’re working at the lower levels and the recommended way of doing this with Word if you access the Word Help it explains this to you in quite a lot of detail. It’s not a very straightforward procedure to be honest with you, but you basically use a multilevel list as here, as we used for multilevel lists earlier on, but linked to the heading numbers. So in the styles here, Heading 2 would say 1.1 double-A, double-B. But as I say, the Word Help gives you a link through to a community help section that explains to you how to do that. So we’ve now got our chapter numbers numbered and the next thing I’d like to look at, in fact the last main thing in relation to a long document is how to put a table of contents in.

So I’m going to close the Navigation Pane and I’m going to decide where I want my table of contents to go. I’m going to put it here, just partway down the first page under the sort of heading. Then go to the References tab. One of the options on the References tab is Table of Contents. Click on Table of Contents and I’m presented with some options for automatic layouts for Table of Content. You can see the different layout styles there. I’m going to go for, I think, the first one. Note that there are some options down at the bottom to do custom Table of Contents and also, of course, to remove a Table of Contents if you’ve previously put one in and want to remove it again. But on this occasion, I’m just going to go for the first one, click on there, and let me just scroll back up again, and there is my Table of Contents.

Now at any time that I’m working on the document, particularly if I’m working on a long document for a long time, I may need to update the Table of Contents. I may be putting pages in, taking pages out, putting whole chapters in and taking them out. So if you right click on the Table of Contents, one of the options you have is to update and if you click on Update, it says Update Table of Contents. It gives you the option of either updating just the page numbers. So if you haven’t changed any chapters, you just want to update the page numbers you can do that. But if you want to update the entire table, that’s remake the whole thing you choose the second option. Now with modern computers and unless you’ve got a really huge document, it’s probably always best to update the entire table, but if you know for a certain that you haven’t actually added or taken any sections out, just updating page numbers only is fine.

Now if I want to customize the Table of Contents, let me go back to that menu that we saw just now, Table of Contents, click on Custom. And for instance, at the moment I’ve got down to level 3 in the Table of Contents. Supposing I just want the chapters themselves, I can change it to show levels just down to 1, click on OK. Do you want to replace the selected Table of Contents? OK and now all I’ve got is the chapters themselves.

Now one other useful thing to point out here is that the Table of Contents is not just intended as a Table of Contents if you like for a paper document. Each of the entries in the Table of Contents is, in fact, a link and if you hold down the Control key and click on one of the entries in the Table of Contents, suppose I click on Create a Simple Database, it takes me to that point in the document and that is how the Table of Contents is intended to be used in an electronic version of a document.

So there’s just a couple of other things now while we’re talking about long documents. One of the things we talked about very, very early on in the course was the types of view that are available, and one of the types of view that mentioned but I couldn’t show you then was Outline View. So if you go to the View tab in the Views Group, Outline View will actually show you a document in terms of its structure and its headings and so on. And it’s a bit like the Expand and Collapse feature that’s been introduced in Word 2013, a more traditional version of that. It’s also a specific view as well. So you close that Outline View when you finished with it. But what it enables you to do, it enables you to control the level at which you’re looking at the overall structure of a document. So for instance, when I’m looking at this Chapter 6 here, if I click on minus it actually collapses that down to just show me the headings within that chapter. Click on one of the headings within the chapter, click on minus, it collapses that down as well. So within the document rather than using the Navigation Pane, you can expand and collapse various parts of the document so that you can concentrate on reading or reviewing a particular that you’re interested in. So that’s Outline View and we close it from here.

So that’s it on long documents. I mentioned towards the beginning of this section about technical documents. There are various things you can help with technical documents such as the use of a Thesaurus and various research tools. There are also additional things you can generally use in long documents. For instance, you can insert a cover page. You can also insert an index and then add terms to that index. You also have things like endnotes, footnotes, and so on. These are all outside the scope of this course but well worth looking into, particularly if you deal with long and/or technical documents.

So that’s it in this section. I’ll see you in the next one.

Simon C

Chris “Simon” Calder was working as a Project Manager in IT for one of Los Angeles’ most prestigious cultural institutions, LACMA. He taught himself to use Microsoft Project from a giant textbook and hated every moment of it. Online learning was in its infancy then, but he spotted an opportunity and made an online MS Project course - the rest, as they say, is history!