Doing Your Dissertation with Microsoft(R) Word

Time is one of our most precious commodities – especially to a student completing a Master’s or PhD and having to type their own thesis or dissertation, as most 21st century students now do. What would you do with an extra month to work on your dissertation? If you had to assign a financial value to a month, what would that be? That is the bold claim of this book – that typical students with a standard knowledge of Microsoft Word completing a full PhD dissertation who know and use the information provided in this book might be able to submit their dissertation approximately a month earlier (or have an extra month’s worth of time to focus on their research work). This claim is made on the basis of the author’s extensive experience in assisting students with problems encountered in the typing of their dissertations and teaching these principles to postgraduate students in a focused Microsoft Word training course. But it gets better. The techniques presented in this book do not save time by taking shortcuts that impinge on the quality of the final product.
In fact, the focus of these techniques is how to improve the quality of the submitted dissertation by avoiding the mistakes students commonly make as a result of their lack of knowledge about the features offered by Microsoft Word. In other words, better quality work is obtained by employing techniques that simultaneously allow students to work faster. So what will you do with your month? This book contains over 500 pages of help on everything you need to know to create thesis formatting in Microsoft Word you can be proud of! (Unfortunately, the content remains your responsibility!) The book will also be of use to any person needing to create large documents in Microsoft Word, and is thus not limited to the academic context.
Topics include: Learning to work faster in the Word environment; Correct use of fonts and special characters; Automated text input; Working with templates; Using styles for automated and consistent formatting; Proper page setup; Heading numbering; Table/figure numbering; Foot/endnotes; Indexes; Automated tables of content; Search and replace; Document navigation; Managing large and/or multiple documents; Citations and References; Using Word’s reviewing tools; Tables; Charts; Equations; Drawings and picture editing in Word; Printing your dissertation.

Author Biography

Dr. Jacques Raubenheimer has completed two master’s degrees (Psychology, Theology) and one PhD (Research Psychology). He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Biostatistics at the University of the Free State and a research consultant and computer trainer. He is a Microsoft Certified Trainer and a Microsoft Office 2010 Specialist Master Instructor, a Microsoft Office Specialist for Word (Expert), Excel (Expert), Access, PowerPoint and Outlook. He has extensive experience in training students hands-on to write their theses and dissertations.