Help writing my thesis in MS Word

fletch

I'm writing up my thesis at the moment in college. I am using Microsoft(r) Word 2003 to do so, I am not open to any suggestions at using any other programs like LaTeX etc as I am used to Word.
One thing I am trying to get it to do and can't is the following.
At the end of the thesis, all my references are listed. These are "referenced" to throughout the thesis using the bullet number eg [1]. Basically I want to ensure that if I change the number of the bullet point in the references, it updates all the references throughout the document...I hope this makes sense.
Help appreciated

seamus

I don't think you can change the bullet's number in the references section. Word keeps track of where you inserted your references. If you have to go back and insert a new reference between the others, it will assign it the correct number, and increment the subsequent ones. If you delete a reference, it will correct them too.

Just make sure that each time you want to add a reference to the end of a document, you use Insert -> Reference -> Footnote. If you simply type "[1]" where ever you want to insert a reference, Word has no idea that this is a reference, so there's no way of dynamically rearranging them.

Back when I did some support in UCD, I had one guy in particular who had 60 or 70 references manually typed into the document as I describe above. He had to remove numbers 3 and 4. He asked me if word would update the other 60-odd ones automatically.....nope.

KAGY

Hi Fletch,
an non computing solution would be to use a non numbered reference (which is what you would probably see in the papers). for example:
Other authors found that ... [Smith et. al. 1999] and [Jones & Jones 2002]
you will probably find that this would be unique enough to index your references

If you want to stick to numbering and references, make a style (say PaperRef) which has the numbering you want. Insert the cross reference (insert > references > cross reference and choose paragraph number, if you want to show the text as well choose paragraph text.

to update, select all and press F9, you may want to enable the update fields options on the print tab too.
Try it a couple of times to make sure it works on a dummy document.

fletch wrote:

I'm writing up my thesis at the moment in college. I am using Microsoft(r) Word 2003 to do so, I am not open to any suggestions at using any other programs like LaTeX etc as I am used to Word.
One thing I am trying to get it to do and can't is the following.
At the end of the thesis, all my references are listed. These are "referenced" to throughout the thesis using the bullet number eg [1]. Basically I want to ensure that if I change the number of the bullet point in the references, it updates all the references throughout the document...I hope this makes sense.
Help appreciated

KAGY

forgot to say that you are referencing numbered items, but it's the default option. If you have used the caption tool (as i did for the figures, charts, equations etc) you can cross reference them in the same way as my last post