Tools for Information Literacy

Exercises to practice some of the page setup tools

Set up your document

We will begin by setting up the framework for the document, stating the page layout.
This is analogous to deciding on a screen resolution when designing the size of a website.

Page set up skills

Open The 2024f.The-information.docx and then save it as a .docx document, using our class file naming convention.

File naming

The document is now ready to be formatted with more sophisticated tools. Save it as

• lastName.firstName.YYYYMMDD.the-information.docx
• as an example, johnson.pat.20241028.the-information.docx

Saving it as a .docx allows you to do some object manipulation not available in a .txt file.

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full

Set up the program to show indications of markup

Find the paragraph mark in the header ribbon (also known as a pilcrow) and select it. It is in the same place and does the same thing in both Windows and Mac operating systems.

Having selected it, you can now see the end of each paragraph in the document. The paragraph mark/pilcrow is analogous to the </p> tag in HTML.

Find and replace

Use the find and replace tool (it's easiest to use CNTL+H) to tidy up the text.

Find and replace each instance where a space follows an end of paragraph markup

The document you have is partially formatted, but we want to finish the job, to make it ready to be submitted as an Honors Thesis. Some of the paragraphs in the document start with a space and this needs correcting. Remove all initial spaces by finding all close paragraph tags that are followed by a space
and replace them with just a close paragraph tag.

Remember the close paragraph tag in MSWord is a ^p, the open paragraph tag is not shown.

Using your CNTL+H tool, find all instances of a blank space followed by a Paragraph Character and replace them with solely a ^p. A blank space will not display in the CNTL+H dialog box, but it is rendered by typing in a space. A Paragraph Character is rendered by typing in a ^p.

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full

Just to be certain we removed them all, use the CNTL+H dialog box once more and run it again to ensure the remaining Paragraph Characters (^p) are not followed by a space (remember, a space is something; but it displays in the CNTL+H tool as nothing).

You will see that the first action made 235 changes to your document; the second, hopefully, could find no ^p[space].

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full

You have now taken out all the unnecessary spaces and allowed each paragraph to start with the first letter of the first word.

Page setup

Set the document up to be printed and bound. But before you do that, be sure that your program is set up to work for you and not against you. From File, find your Options,

Determine the paper size to use

Paper size standards govern the size of sheets of paper used as writing paper, stationery, cards, and for some printed documents.
The ISO 216 standard, which includes the commonly used A4 size, is the international standard for paper size. It is used across the world except in North America and parts of Central and South America, where North American paper sizes such as "Letter" and "Legal" are used.

Assuming our printer is in the United States, we need to ensure the page is set up appropriately.

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full

Set the margins to determine the printable space

Ensure the page will be in portrait orientation.

Using the UNC Graduate School Thesis and Dissertation Guide for guidance, ...

1. Set a one inch margins left and right, top and bottom for entire document
2. Set the page up to print with mirror margins (this will ensure the printer prints on the front and the back of each sheet)
3. Set a .5 inch margin for the gutter (this is the area that will be bound and thus will not be seen)

Once you have selected mirror margins, the gutter position will be on the inside of the page, whether the page is an odd page or an even page.

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full

Prepare the document to have multiple sections in it

We will each section in our document to start on an odd numbered page and we will want to have different headers on odd and even pages. So ...

1. Ensure that each new section starts on an odd page
2. Ensure that headers and footers different odd and even and different first page because we don't want headers on the initial page of each new section
3. Ensure that the header and footer spacing is .5 inches from the edge (of the printable area on each sheet)

And ensure that every one of these settings is for the entire document.

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full

With that done, we may turn our attention to other objects and elements before concentrating on the text.

Page breaks and Sectioning

Insert a page break immediately before the works "2011 James Gleick".

Section the document so that each chapter starts on an odd numbered page

Insert an odd page section break immediately prior to
ABSTRACT,
CONTENTS,
PROLOGUE,
1 | DRUMS THAT TALK and all the chapter numbers and names to follow through 15 | NEW NEWS EVERY DAY,
EPILOGUE,
Acknowledgments,
Bibliography,
Index,
and
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Use your CNTL+F tool to find them. The chapter titles all have a | in their names, so search for a [space]|[space] and you will find the chapters.

Open the image in a new tab to see it in full