I was up bright and early this (Saturday) morning. I was giving a two-hour lecture to our local genealogy society (Fairfax Genealogical Society). The topic was "Number Your Family History: Automated Tasks in MS Word." So, in honor of my early rising (and a very difficult topic to deliver to a crowd!), I thought I'd share some brief suggestions for "Automated Tasks in MS Word" that might be of interest to genealogists.
These suggestions mainly pertain to using Word to write a longer genealogy article or family history. Hopefully if you do a lot of writing in Word, you already use or at least know of these. If not, open up Word's help feature and get learning!
1. Use automatic page numbering, not just 1, 2, 3 but also i, ii, iii and any other subgroups of pages you need to number differently.
2. For chapters or sections (or both in a longer work)-use automatic numbering in the Chapter (or section) title.
3. Bookmark your chapter/section numbers and titles for later cross-reference.
3b. Use the same method for citations you want to reference, elsewhere.
4. Use automatic numbering for figures, tables, or other 'inserts.'
5. Use Word's built in "Tables" to create your Table of Contents, Table of Figures, etc.
6. Create macros for any other repetitive tasks. Remember, Word may already have a button for part of the task but if you have to enter tabs, spaces, or identical text after pushing that button, it's a perfect task for a macro.
Make sure you've investigated automated options for anything else that requires sequential numbering or that will be referenced elsewhere. Once you do, you'll be free to insert and change without fear of forgetting to manually update. There are often multiple ways to speed up any task, one should work for you.
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