Microsoft Word

Microsoft Word is a graphical interface that is good to create professional looking documents that may include: text, pictures, tables, equations, and several other things that writing reports is all about.

I used Word when I wrote my senior design paper and definately learned how to used some not so familiar tools to make the document look good.

One of the major things that most students do is create separate documents because they need to have section that require different page numbers, or a title page that needs to not have the page number on it. This is an extremely easy task and keeps your document all together in one single file.

To accomplish this, the document should be broken into sections. If you don't know the different types of sections there are, google microsoft word sections. Breaking the document into sections allows you to define different parameters for each section such as page numbers and such. The advantage of sections is that you can also link them together to still have a good flowing document. Once the sections have been created, it is possible to define the page numbers, headers, footers, or basically whatever else you want for each section. At this point, I was going to create a video however with my small amount of storage on this server, it would be easier just to YouTube a video on it or email me with a specific question.

Another thing that I found useful was inserting another document type into a Word document. This is said more easily than actually accomplished. There were times when I needed to insert an excel table into my report, and rather than try to copy it and make sure the formatting was consistent, use the document import. Now if there is a section of a PDF file that you wish to include in a word document, I suggest using Acrobat's Snapshot tool which allows you to take a screenshot of a desired area. It's very clean and efficient to use the image rather than try to insert only part of a PDF document.

Also, please dont be discouraged to try and insert other documents. Microsoft Word is quickly becoming an electronic document viewer as well, so I am sure that it is not impossible to include videos into a word document that is meant to be viewed on a computer only

Once again, if there is some specific package that you want information on please email me your request and I will do my best to point you in the right direction.