How To: Styles, Templates, and Quick Styles in Word 2007
I'm using Word 2007 and RefWorks, including the Write-N-Cite III Word plug in. I don't want any crap from you LaTeX users. Yes, I know how to use LaTeX. No, I didn't pick it for my dissertation. Moving on.
Rackham, the graduate school at the University of Michigan, has arcane and ugly formatting requirements that my dissertation must meet in order for me to receive my degree. They will not let me graduate if my margins or headers are wrong. That's pretty compelling incentive to get my formatting right. Using the excellent "Using Word 2007 for Your Dissertation" guide provided by the University Library's Knowledge Navigation Center as a starting point, I set off to make sure Word would format my dissertation correctly.
The keys to making your formatting life easy with Word are styles and templates. You can learn more about both at Microsoft's site. I'm a faithful style user, and I assume you can easily become one if you aren't already. All text in my documents is associated with some style - e.g., Normal, Heading 1, Long Quote. You need not worry about the specifics of a style while you write - just make sure all your text is associated with a style. Word does much of that automatically. Once you're done writing and ready to format, you should first open a new blank document and create a template.
Creating a Template
The real purpose of your template is to store the formatting rules you assign to all your different styles. Your template need not have any content, but I find it helpful to write a little something so I can at least see my style changes in action. To create a template, you need to edit the styles so they match your formatting rules and then save the document as a template (*.dotx) instead of a regular document.
Attaching Templates to Files
Once you have defined all your styles and formatting rules in a template, you need to attach the template to your Word document. In Word 2007,
- Go to the Office button
- Choose "Word Options" from the bottom
- Choose "Add Ins" from the side menu
- Choose "Templates" from the Manage drop down at the bottom
- Click "Go..."
- Click "Attach" and navigate to the template file you just created and saved
- Make sure "Automatically update document styles" is selected
- Click "Ok"
You should see your document change to reflect the formatting rules in your template.
Using Quick Styles
One of my favorite features of Word 2007 is the Quick Styles feature. Quick Styles let you save template rules so they are accessible from the "Change Styles" menu on the Home ribbon. To get your formatting rules into a Quick Style, essentially saving you the hassle of attaching a template:
- Open your template file
- Click "Change styles" on the Home ribbon
- Choose "Style set" and then "Save as Quick Style Set..."
- Give your set a name you'll remember and click "Save"
Now, you can apply your template's rules in any document right from the Quick Style menu by click "Change Styles", then "Style Set," and choosing the name you gave your set.
Notes
I wrote this post in part to remind myself of the steps involved. Styles and templates can make working in Word incredibly easy, but you absolutely must always use styles to format your text. If you make changes by hand (e.g., clicking Ctrl+B to make something bold), you'll screw the whole process up. Only when used together (and exclusively) will styles and templates make your writing life easier.
Office 2008 for Mac can do the styles and templates stuff but does not have a useful Quick Styles feature. To attach a template to a document in Office 2008 for Mac:
- Open the "Tools" menu
- Choose "Templates and Add Ins..."
- Click "Attach" and navigate to the template document you created
- Make sure "Automatically update document styles" is selected
- Click "Ok"
If you're using RefWorks, you should use either Word 2007 or Word 2008 but not both. RefWorks gets confused when you try to add or edit citations with both programs. I do most of my writing in Word 2007 on a virtual machine running Windows 7. I occasionally make edits using Word 2008 natively on my Mac, but I do not make changes to citations in both programs.
Academic writers cannot get writer’s block
At least, that's what Paul J. Silvia, author of How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing
I've been reading books on writing while taking breaks from my ever-growing dissertation. Today I read a little of the Howard Becker Gem Writing for Social Scientists: How to Start and Finish Your Thesis, Book, or Article
Academic writers cannot get writer’s block. Don’t confuse yourself with your friends teaching creative writing in the fine arts department. You’re not crafting a deep narrative or composing metaphors that expose mysteries of the human heart. The subtlety of your analysis of variance will not move readers to tears, although the tediousness of it might…Novelists and poets are the landscape artists and portrait painters; academic writers are the people with big paint sprayers who repaint your basement. (p. 45)
and
Like their dislike of jocks and the yearbook club, many writers’ distrust of semicolons is a prejudice from high school. … While you’re rebuilding your relationship with the semicolon, reach out and make a new friend – the dash. Good writers are addicted to dashes. (p. 67-68)
I'm proud to say that I a) do not have writer's block and b) use both semicolons and dashes often and appropriately. I have trouble sticking to a writing schedule as Silvia (and many, many other writing guide authors) recommend, but at least I've mastered the dash.
The Wrongheadedness of Best Practice Thinking
I’ve come across a gem of a book introduction, and I’m writing to recommend that you read it. Yes, all of you. The introduction is from the book Strategic Procurement in Construction
Cox and Townsend argue in their introduction, and throughout the book, that best practice thinking is wrong-headed and leaves us playing catch up. One of my favorite bits of the introduction reads:
They will be searching for the ‘Holy Grail’ of best practice. By this one means practitioners are looking for the answer that provides the solution to all of the problems which they face managerially. Unfortunately, this desire to discover the single solution (best practice), that will allow the practitioner to avoid the need for thought and risk taking, is an illusion.
They go on to discuss concepts such as appropriateness and leverage and recognize that many practitioners would call their discussions “common sense.” Their response?
Some of the practitioners who read these pages may accept what has been said, and argue that this is just common sense (which it is), and that they already know this. If that is the case then this book may have little to teach them, however, because experience leads the authors to conclude that such a form of sense (in a business context) does not appear to be all that common.
I wish I’d written something like that in the paper Andy and I submitted recently that was rejected for having results that were not surprising enough. The results we found in our onboarding study were surprising because we found them and not necessarily in their content. For instance, it’s surprising that teams still behave as though new employees will be immediately productive even though the sense that onboarding takes time is apparently common. Much like Cox and Townsend find that strategic procurement is not all that common, neither are teams who smoothly onboard their new members.
My questions as I continue to read Cox and Townsend’s book are really about how one encourages strategic, reflective thinking over best practice thinking and how one should present research results that show just how uncommon common sense can be. See, one can learn things by studying construction projects. This message brought to you by my dissertation, a work in progress.
JavaScript date checking
Sometimes we ask users to enter a date range. I wrote some code today to check whether the date a user entered was (1) after today and (2) before some other date she entered. In my situation, I was building a flight search form and wanted to check that the user-entered departure date was before the user-entered return date and that the user wasn't trying to depart in the past. To do this, I needed to turn the user's input into a JavaScript Date and then compare that Date to Today's date. I found a lot of similar code online, but none of it work quite right.
I have a form with text box inputs for dateDepart and dateReturn. This code takes those inputs, turns them in JavaScript dates, compares them to each other and to today, and returns alerts or submits the form, depending on how the comparisons shake out.
Here's my code:
// check to make sure Return date is after Departure date, and both are after today
if ( (the_form.dateDepart.value !="") && (the_form.dateReturn.value !="") )
{
var strFromDate = the_form.dateDepart.value;
var dayPartFromDate = parseInt(strFromDate.substring(3,5),10);
var monPartFromDate = parseInt(strFromDate.substring(0,2),10);
var yearPartFromDate = parseInt(strFromDate.substring(6,10),10);
var dtDepart = new Date(yearPartFromDate, monPartFromDate-1, dayPartFromDate);
var strToDate = the_form.dateReturn.value;
var dayPartToDate = parseInt(strToDate.substring(3,5),10);
var monPartToDate = parseInt(strToDate.substring(0,2),10);
var yearPartToDate = parseInt(strToDate.substring(6,10),10);
var dtReturn = new Date(yearPartToDate, monPartToDate-1, dayPartToDate);
var now = new Date();
var today = new Date(now.getFullYear(),now.getMonth(),now.getDate());
if(dtDepart > dtReturn)
{
alert('Departure date must be before return date. Please fix and resubmit.');
return false;
}
else if (dtDepart < today)
{
alert('Departure date must be after today. Please fix and resubmit.');
return false;
}
else
{
the_form.submit();
}
}
Turn User Input into a JavaScript Date
To turn the user's input into a Date, I needed to parse the input and then pass the pieces to the Date() function.
The JavaScript substr function syntax I used corresponds to dateToChange.substring(start,finish). My users are mostly in the U.S., and they enter dates in the form MM/DD/YYYY, e.g., 03/14/2009. JavaScript starts counting at 0, so the substr functions above grab "14" for the day, "03" for the month, and "2009" for the year and then pass those substrings to the Date()function to be converted in a Date JavaScript understands.
getFullYear(); returns a four-digit year such as "2009" that makes it easy to compare to the default version of today's date that
var now = new Date();
var today = new Date(now.getFullYear(),now.getMonth(),now.getDate());
gives.
Why monPartToDate-1? Remember, JavaScript starts counting at 0, so January is month 0, and December is month 11. That means I need to subtract 1 from what my user entered to get the right month for JavaScript.
Compare Dates
I needed to compare the two dates the user entered to make sure she had departure first, then return. Once I have converted both her inputs to JavaScript dates, the comparison uses a simple "greater than" operator: dtDepart > dtReturn
Calling the Date-checking Function
You'll notice my code doesn't include a function declaration; that's because this date-checking procedure is part of a larger function to validate my form. You could wrap this code in a function declaration such as
function checkDates(the_form){}
In order to call the code when the user submits the form, I like to use something like
<input id="search" onclick="checkDates(this.form);" type="button" value="Submit Form" />
in the HTML.
NSF Workshop Report on Qualitative Research
The report for NSF's two-day workshop on Interdisciplinary Standards for Systematic Qualitative Research is now available. The goals of the workshop were to (quoted from the report):
- articulate the standards used in their particular field to ensure rigor across the range of qualitative methodological approaches;
- identify common criteria shared across the four disciplines for designing and evaluating research proposals and fostering multidisciplinary collaborations; and
- develop an agenda for strengthening the tools, training, data, research design, and infrastructure for research using qualitative approaches.
The whole report is 180 pages long, but you can get the gist from the executive summary. For graduate students, the longer sections on "Recommendations for Producing Top Notch Qualitative Research" and "Promising New Research Areas and Topics" are especially interesting reads. I'll post more details when I have a little more time. We don't get to see into the minds of our faculty members every day, and reports like this one give us a glimpse. Take a look, and keep working on your top notch research.
Review: iPhone glass replacement from Mission: Repair
My Situation
I dropped my iPhone 3G and broke its glass. I was so distraught about dropping it that I never got a picture of the broken glass. Trust me, it was depressing.
I checked with the Apple store about a repair, and they offered me a replacement for $299 + tax. That seemed steep and wasteful, so I went hunting online for repair options. No need to fill landfills with broken iPhones. I found two companies who do iPhone glass repairs and had positive reviews: Mission: Repair and iResQ. After blogging about my broken glass, I got emails and blog comments from employees at both companies. Way to be on top of the blogosphere, guys. After checking prices and reviews, I decided to go with Mission: Repair.
Disclaimer: Ryan at Mission: Repair offered to pay me for the ads on my blog whether I got my repair through them or not. He also offered me the same discount available to Apple store visitors who get a coupon from the Genius bar.
My Repair
I chose the 3G iPhone Digitizer Glass Repair and the "I'll send it in; return it to me overnight!" option for $9 extra.
My Review
So, how did it go? Swimmingly!
I sent the phone off via USPS Priority Mail with delivery confirmation on Monday from Ann Arbor. According to the USPS, my package arrived at 11:25am. Less than 2 hours later, I received an email from Phil at MR letting me know they had received my iPhone and would fix it right away. They fixed it Wednesday, shipped it first thing Thursday morning, and I received my phone back in near-new condition on Friday in Los Angeles (I was traveling). At first I was concerned that the glass was not flush with the sides of the phone, but I saw the "real" thing at the Apple store today, and the glass isn't flush on brand new iPhones either.
Bottom Line
Mission: Repair will fix your iPhone glass for less than the other guys and will do it fast and right. I highly recommend them.
Almost! A blog commenter’s story
I posted a comment to Freakonomics today, and I almost made it on the first page of comments. Sadly, mine is #27 and is unlikely to be read by anyone but those of you who clicked it from here. Or maybe, if I get really lucky, someone else procrastinating bigger things will post a "re: #27" comment later.
The Freakonomics post was about a website where potential employers could post mini projects for students and other job seekers to complete. The idea is that then job seekers can demonstrate their skills before being interviewed or hired. Sadly, I think such a site would get plenty of traffic. I sympathize with all the students who would feel compelled to do those extra projects during what little remains of their sleeping hours. And no, I don't think it would help them get jobs.
Oh, I also commented on Question: Where to Study Information Visualization or Infographics at Information Aesthetics today. Yes, I gave the School of Information a shout out. I would love to have more infoaesthetics types around.
On the employer side, I doubt that such a site would actually help find appropriate employees. If my work at Microsoft taught me nothing else, it showed that domain proficiency does not indicate success in employment. Great engineers have mad social skills. All engineers spend more time in meetings than any student could ever imagine. A site for mini projects might get work done for free, but it won't help people weed through CS graduates to find the ones that can work in teams and on large-scale projects. Now if only there were some way to figure out whether a potential employee could work well with others...