Formatting with Word

 

Most of us are old pros because we use Word for our manuscripts. Many authors are trying their hand at indie publishing these days. I wanted to give a few tips on formatting a document for publication.

You need several elements in your document for it to be correctly formatted for publication: headings, bookmarks, a table of contents, and hyperlinks.

Adding Headings

Highlight your chapter name or text that will be a heading. On the Home ribbon, you can choose Heading. This will reformat your text with font, size, and color. You can change the style by clicking on the arrow. Or the Design ribbon shows the styles, and you can customize them. For now, it’s easy to use what is already on the Home ribbon. Do this for each section you want in a table of contents—chapters, special pages, titles.

To view the headings all at once, press the Home ribbon and select Find. There is a prompt for Find on the right window. Below it is a tab labeled Headings. Here, the program will list all headings in order in your document. You can see if you missed a number or have two chapter sixes. 

Giving a section a heading creates a virtual table of contents, and you can move sections easily. In the Find window, click and drag a heading title to move the section to another spot. 

Be aware. Inside the document, each heading will now have a black carrot mark next to it. Clicking on the carrot with hide the section under that heading. It might look like your entire chapter eleven disappeared, but Word just stopped displaying that text. Click the carrot again to show the text.

Make a TOC page

To create a true table of contents in your document, create a page and type all the headings from your document. You can use either Page Break or Section Break to create the new page. Title the page Table of Contents. Make that text a heading as well. Now you will need to create links from your list to the headings (chapter titles, etc.). 

Creating Bookmarks

Go to each heading and highlight the text. Click on the Insert ribbon and select Bookmark. The location is marked in the document. Label each bookmark with a title (no spaces) that tells you the bookmark’s location. Something like Ch_1 or TOC (for table of contents) or CPYRT. Click Add. Word creates a virtual list of all your bookmarks. 

Linking it all together

Return to the table of contents page. Highlight a line–let’s say Chapter One. Right-click and select Link from the pop-up menu. Word will open a window asking where to link the text to. On the left is a list of choices, including Inside this Document. Choose that. You should now see all the bookmarks you created previously. Click on the correct place for the link to connect and press Okay. Your listing will be blue and underlined. Press Ctrl and click on the new link. It should take you to the bookmarked location in your document.

Repeat the steps for chapters, special pages, everything to be listed in a table of contents. Once the list is finished, link the chapter headings back to the table of contents. Highlight each heading within the document, one at a time. Right-click and choose Link, then within the document again. Click on TOC (or whatever you called the table of contents page). Then press Okay. Be sure to check all your links to ensure they work.

Your manuscript is one step closer to publication! 

I hope these tips help. I’m available for group or individual lessons on any of the programs on my blog. Contact me at ginnyfrost@ginnyfrost.com.