Tools for Information Literacy ⑨ Document objects

Exercises to practice some of the document setup tools

Since Thursday and Friday are Fall Break, many may find they must do this work using only these web pages as a guide, though we will try to record the activitiies in Wednesday recitations and make them available in Canvas.

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 2025fall.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_20251027_the-information.docx

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

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 marks that are followed by a space.
and replace them with just a close paragraph mark.

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

Using your CNTL+H tool, find all instances of a blank space followed by a paragraph mark 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 mark is rendered by typing in a ^p.

[MSWord replace unneeded spaces and tabs]

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 marks (^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].

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.

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, ...

Set a one inch margins left and right, top and bottom for entire document
Set the page up to print with mirror margins (this will ensure the printer prints on the front and the back of each sheet)

We don't need a gutter according to the Thesis and Dissertation Guide, but we may have one if we wish.

Set a .25 inch margin for the gutter (this is the area that will be bound and thus will not be seen).
The image below shows a gutter of .5 inches, but we will follow the Thesis and Dissertation Guide and have a .25 gutter.

The Thesis and Dissertation Guidelines imply the printing will be on one side of the paper, but do not preclude printing on both sides. We will thus set up our document to be print on both sides of the piece of paper by selecting mirror margins.

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.

Prepare the document to have multiple sections in it

We will ensure that each section in our document will start on an odd numbered page and we will want to have different headers on odd and even pages. But we will also know that the first page of each section will be an odd numbered page, so ...

Ensure that each new section starts on an odd page
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
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.

[MSWord page setup section start, headers and footers]

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 after the words "Kenneth Gyan", but before the paragraph mark.

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.