Office 2010: The Missing Manual

Chapter 6. Reports and Long Documents

Long documents are the Mount Everest of word processing: a lofty goal full of special challenges. From research papers to marketing reports, from software specifications to the Great American Novel, you can ease readers’ long treks by breaking long stretches of writing into manageable chunks. Chapters and sections, for starters, are simple ways to mark off discrete topics. A table of contents and an index can help speed navigation. And for some documents—such as academic and scientific papers—citations and a bibliography are a must.

Word 2010 handles lots of this heavy lifting for you, saving time and frustration. This chapter shows you how to make your opus more manageable, with a little help from Word.

Inserting Page Breaks

In the days of typewriters, starting a new chapter was easy: Remove the current sheet of paper, roll in a fresh, clean one, and type the new chapter’s title on the first line. But when a single word-processing file can easily hold an entire book, starting a new chapter is less straightforward. Some writers keep hitting Enter until they’re at the top of a new page. Don’t do that! If you make any changes later (adding or deleting a paragraph, for example), subsequent chapter titles can jump around so that they’re no longer at the top of a new page.

The easiest way to end an old chapter and start a new one is to insert a page break between chapters. The advantage to this method is clear: the page break stays in place, no matter ...