The Show/Hide button allows you to see editing marks in your document, which can be useful for erasing formatting mistakes that may not be obvious when looking at your document in a normal view.
Adding captions to your figures and tables is an essential part of many thesis/dissertations styles.
You can create a Table of Contents either manually or by using Headings to have Word create the Table of Contents automatically after you've assigned those Headings in the text.
Insert a table of contents in Word
Generate a Table of Contents (LinkedIn Learning, might require Rutgers NetID login)
This will, by far, be the most useful of the formatting skills you'll learn in MS Word. Use this to create sections that have different formatting from other sections. For instance, your front matter will be one section, and then you’ll have a section break that will allow you to format your first chapter differently than the front matter.
These instructions show how to format page numbers for the preliminary pages and the main text sections, but they can be adapted to other sections as well.
Styles let you set a template for the typeface, paragraph spacing, and other formatted elements in a document. If you choose to use the single document method, setting a style for your document will save you time and effort down the road.
Customize or create new styles in Word
Templates are an option if you want to create your thesis or dissertation one chapter at a time. If you use a template, every time you open the template, you will get the same formatting every time. Be aware that, when trying to combine chapters at the end of the writing process, there may be conflicts between the template you create for chapters and other items, such as indexes, front matter, and tables of contents.
Save a Word document as a template