Final paper time
With mid-terms, exams, and most importantly, final papers coming up, I wanted to drill into some of the capabilities that might help student readers with their workloads. Citations, equations, and the like saw some pretty cool changes in 2007.
References Tab
The References Tab of the ribbon is kind of like a one stop shop for any true academic.
You can see that everything lives here from the ability to quickly create a table of contents to putting in citations. I know that when I was in college, the biggest pain for me was going back and writing up citations. I would spend weeks putting together a paper and finish up that conclusion only to realize that I needed to go back and painstakingly create my bibliography. Now, while some students may have been more organized than me and diligently kept their list running as they worked, our functionality saves them time too. So in this post we are going to talk about what we can do here and how to really make one heck of a bibliography.
Citations and Bibliographies
Obviously we want to insert our citations as we write that paper, but a quick way to drop from an A to an A- is to get the style wrong. We take care of that though, because we automatically provide the fields that you want for a particular style. So, for example, social sciences usually use the MLA or APA style. Word provides you with a pretty extensive list here so it should cover almost all needs. Once the style is chosen, all we need to do is click at the end of the sentence in the document where we want to add a citation. Once we have selected where want our information to go, all we have to do is click the "Insert Citation" drop down. In this case, we will want to add a new source.
Clicking on add a new source will launch what is essentially a template that is dictated by the style we chose earlier and the type of citation we want to have. So for example, below is the information we would need to provide if I wanted to cite a website using the APA style.
Once I have filled in this information, I just click OK, and the citation is in place. Ah, but where does it go you might ask? Well, this is the part that I find to be so very cool. As I write my paper, all of the citations that I have been inputting are stored in this awesome tool called the source manager which can be accessed by clicking "Manage Sources". This means that instead of my list of books I have been pouring over going into the ether I call index cards, all of my work is stored in one little handy database. Enter incredible time savings.
I've finished my paper and input my information as I've gone along. I know that everything I have been working on is stored in my source manager is safe and sound and ready to be put to good use. Well, all I need to do is click the "Bibliography" drop-down and choose whether I want a bibliography or works cited. Word will then pull the information that you have in your current list and auto generate the information you need into a formatted bibliography (or works cited). It really is that easy.
There are some really cool power features that I didn't dive into that live in the source manager like the ability to keep a master list (great for students working on papers that often pull from common books or articles) and the ability to search my running bibliography or even preview a particular citation. Anyway, because this is certainly going to save time and headaches, make sure to buy Jon or myself a drink if we are ever on your campus.
-Reed
