Microsoft-Word

In biblical studies, you need to be able to type biblical languages. Transliteration can work, but you can’t always bank on using it. Instead, use Unicode.

Using styles is a great way to ensure consistent formatting in a Word document. But, here’s a way to turn these styles into “direct” formatting.

Style manuals often require that footnotes have a blank line between them. There are two common mistakes about how to get this blank line.

Microsoft Word’s language list can be helpful for multilingual documents. A few simple steps will set it right again if it gets messy.

Tables of contents can consume much more time than they should. But Word can create tables that automatically update with your document.

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.

If you delegate your title page formatting to Word, you can save time formatting. A key preparatory step is to properly segmenting your title page text.

If you delegate your title page formatting to Word, you can save yourself time spent formatting.((Header image provided by Etienne Girardet.)) You can also end up with a title page that’s more precisely formatted. To start delegating your title pages to Word, there are four basic steps. The first of these is to capitalize and center your title page text. ...

You can space your title page content simply by entering blank paragraphs. But if you do so, you set yourself up for more work and at least three problems.

To pass your title page formatting off to Word, you need to start by understanding what SBL style requires in formatting your title page.

Style manuals often require that footnotes have a blank line between them. The best method for achieving this spacing is to edit the footnote style.

To follow the “Student Supplement for The SBL Handbook of Style,” there are three key steps to editing the styles for your table of contents.

It’s not immediately clear how to customize some formatting for tables of contents. The key to make the formatting “stick” is to modify its styles.

Microsoft Word can quickly create tables of contents so that the headings and page numbers update along with your document.

In Microsoft Word, a “style” is a collection of one or more pieces of formatting information. Styles are especially helpful when you use them to format your headings.

The guidance about page number placement in for SBL style long essays is clear enough. Achieving this placement in Word can be too with some simple steps.

The guidance about page number placement in for SBL style short essays is clear enough. Achieving this placement in Word can be too with some simple steps.

In Dan Gookin’s Word 2016 for Dummies ( affiliate disclosure; Wiley, 2016), he provides a good deal of helpful guidance for beginning Word users. One particularly helpful resource that may be of interest more broadly is his nicely condensed presentation of prefix keys for producing diacritical marks (pg. 256, reproduced below). ...

The “for dummies” series has a couple good introductions to Microsoft Word ( for all and specifically “for professionals”). But, these texts seem to concentrate on Word as it appears in Windows, which is sometimes surprisingly inconsistent with how ostensibly the same version of Word appears in Mac OS. ...

Overlining is comparatively straightforward in Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. But, for Microsoft Word users, overlining still isn’t a default formatting feature, as is its companion underlining. Sometimes inserting a symbol or special character will work if you can find one that matches the overlined character you need. In other cases, Word’s cache of symbols and special characters simply isn’t large enough to cover everything (e.g., when discussing nomina sacra). Sometimes, creating a character image might work, but inserting an image can create issues with text flow and line spacing. ...

Microsoft Word ties footnote anchors in the main text and footnote numbers at the start of footnotes to the same style. Consequently, it’s difficult to get full-height footnote numbers followed by a period (cf. Chicago Manual of Style, SBL Handbook of style). The process for getting this result discussed at Word MVPs does not seem to work in Word v16. But Word’s InsertFootnoteNow function can be intercepted to add the following macro commands to produce this result: ...