Microsoft Word Archives – J. David Stark

Your Word Processor Is Important. But How Do You Use It?

Your word processor is an important tool. But how to make it do many things that are quite common in biblical studies has been pretty obscure.

Combined with a few other steps, editing Word’s “Bibliography” style will give you more consistent formatting with fewer headaches.

You can get your bibliography to look like SBL style requires in a few different ways. But several common approaches create serious problems.

On the first page of a major section, SBL style asks for a 2-inch top margin. But that doesn’t mean you need to change the margin size in Word.

When you select a font, you select its size in a unit called “points.” But the font face also affects the visual size of lines and type on the page.

You can save yourself a lot of time by letting Word handle title page formatting—particularly when you’re vertically justifying the title page text.