Play with it.įinally we’re ready to add the Table of Contents, so go back to your front matter (insert some page breaks if necessary) and insert an Automatic Table of Contents from the Document Elements dropdown.
These are just my tips for moving things around cleanly in a large document.Īnd if when you select a new text style you notice more text than just your header changing, that’s because you’ve used soft returns (shift+enter) between the title and the poem and there needs to be a full return in there somewhere. If you don’t include the page breaks with your cutting and pasting it’s just a little bit more housekeeping, so no worries. The page breaks are a kind of formatting mark and show up like other paragraph marks in different views of Word, so you can switch to “outline” or others in order to see them better.
Ease back until that’s the last thing selected and cut and paste so that you include it. Begin by highlighting from the start of the title/header text, down through the body material, but keep going until you see one line of blue appear that juts out beyond your text.
You still have to learn exactly how to cut and paste (where to do it) in order to move things around with the page breaks. With the styles and the various options screens (paragraph, font, character condensing and expanding), you can do some pretty interesting things visually in Word. If you’ve gone through and set all of your remaining text to be a particular style (or if it’s automatically set on “Normal”), you can open up that style to add line spacing and other visual preferences (for poetry I tend to prefer lines that are spaced just a bit further apart than prose).Īnd for spacing your lines further you’ll open up the “Paragraph” section of those advanced options.įor lines that are monostichs I might even dial this up to a 1.33.
When you define your style, do it based on your own aesthetic considerations (however mystical). I like to do all-caps in the titles and small-caps in the Table of Contents, so that it’s evident which words are capitalized in the title at some point, but when reading it isn’t necessarily drawing focus in that same regard.
Some of the things I like to update are in the advanced options at the bottom of this Modify screen - like font, for things like all-caps or small-caps, and any of the other things you can’t change from the main screen (check out the spacing options next to the paragraph justification buttons). Click on “Modify Style” to change the appearance of your headers or other document elements (or highlight already-formatted text and “update style to match selection”). Here’s the dropdown menu beside any of the styles. (Clearly I’m still sending this poem out, so perhaps you can read the rest soon, oooh.) All the corresponding styles you’ve set will get updated. Once you have your styles applied throughout the document, you can change how they appear using this section. Next to the Styles section is this button that pops out the Styles as its own window pane. So select your titles, and convert them to the “Heading 1” (or 2, etc) style, based on your needs. So if you have multiple sections you might use the heading 1 style for the section titles and the heading 2 style for the poems, and they’ll display in a hierarchy in the Table of Contents. There’s a number of qualities pre-loaded into this Style, including a certain amount of indent or changes to the font or size based on which level of heading you’ve selected (level 1, 2, 3). What you’re trying to do is turn the titles of the pieces (/etc) into the “Heading” style, seen here on the main tab. Anything for which you need headings in a multi-part document or thesis. Inserts a page break! (do this after every poem or piece)