It also helps avoid other formatting problems that could arise when you modify the “Heading” styles and “TOC” styles. By modifying the “Normal” style at the outset, it ensures that you can click on the “Normal” style any time you need to switch the formatting back to a regular paragraph. The “Normal” style is the foundation for your standard paragraph that falls underneath a point heading. The first style that you need to modify is the “Normal” style. For this reason, you need to modify the styles before you begin writing your brief. The problem with the pre-configured styles is that they are not in the format you need in order to have your brief look presentable. Microsoft Word builds a table of contents from different pre-configured “styles,” which it automatically includes in every version of its software. Starting point: Modify the normal style in your Word document Where differences do exist, this article will make reference to the alternate locations. The location of the menus may be slightly different, but the changes to the settings are the same. For those Windows users reading this article, the same settings are available to you in the Windows version of the software. To ease the transition, this article will walk you through the modifications you need in order to automate the creation of those tables when you write a brief.įor the purposes of this article, I am using the most up-to-date version of Microsoft Word for Mac, which is available through the Microsoft 365 plan. While many firms may rely on IT professionals or support staff to configure these changes, the transition to a remote workplace may require you to configure these settings on your personal computer at home. Without that knowledge, any attempt to use the default settings in Microsoft Word would change the line spacing of point headings, change the fonts and colors of headings, and create a table of contents and authorities that was unusable.ĭue to these problems, we tweaked and modified the default settings of Microsoft Word over the years so that the program would automatically create the table of contents and table of authorities for us in the ideal format. However, those same colleagues had no idea how to modify the settings in Microsoft Word to use those features. ![]() To make things easier, other attorneys would recommend that I use Microsoft Word’s built-in table of contents and table of authorities feature. While these tasks were not difficult, they were time-consuming. ![]() As for the table of authorities, I would read the brief and write down each page where a citation appeared so that I could then input those pages into the table of authorities. In the early years of our practice, I would finish my memorandum and then spend a lot of time formatting the table of contents. One of the most frustrating aspects of brief writing is the amount of time it takes to compile the table of contents and table of authorities.
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