Starting the Project Report

• In this lesson, I would like to introduce styles in word.
  • Styles are briefly discussed on page 143-144 of the book.
  • They are discussed in much more detail on 201-208
• Starting the document.
  • I have decided I want to work with the Super Heroes Dataset from kaggle.
    • Look at the description, fields, ...
  • So fire up word and look at
    • Proposal Paper Document
    • Homework 3
    • Enter the following
    • 
• What fonts should we use? Should we make things bold? How should we do the headings?
  • These are all very good questions and your flaky instructor has not told you what to do.
  • You could make guesses and get started.
  • You could ask, but you are in the mood to work and you don't want to delay.
  • So let's start working.
  • But how do I do this without creating a bunch of work later?
• There are three different levels of of formatting in word
  • On the Home tab we see these in the command groups.
    • Font level formatting allows us to change individual characters, words and such.
    • Paragraph level formatting changes the appearance of paragraphs.
    • Styles provide tools for document level formatting.
    • Knowing which level formatting to apply can dramatically impact the work involved in creating a consistent document.
      • If you sit and type up a paper in a single session
        • you are likely to remember how you formatted individual items.
        • And if the paper is short, you can look this over and "fix" things before you turn in the paper.
      • But if you work on a paper long term (semester or longer), or you have multiple authors
        • You will likely forget the styles used.
        • Or the group will not know, or perhaps follow the style guidelines.
        • So when you are finished, you need to go through the document and "clean it up".
        • This is a real pain.
        • And becomes worse as the document gets longer.
  • In general you should apply document level formatting, then paragraph and word.
• Let's add some text into our document
  • The command =lorem(num-p, num-s) will put nonsense text into a document.
    • num-p is the number of paragraphs
    • num-s is the number of sentences in each paragraph.
    • We are learning this only to populate the document with some text.
    • DO NOT TURN IN A PAPER GENERATED WITH LOREM.
  • Use lorem to populate the sections of your document.
    • 
  • That looks more like a paper, and makes more sense than most of mine.
• As I said before, we could format things by hand.
  • Select the title
  • Make it bold, 18 point font and centered.
  • Select the sub-title
  • Make it bold, 14 point font and centered.
  • 
• Formatting the headers
  • Select Introduction,
    • Make it Bold, 14 point font.
  • We could do the same thing to Overview of Data but I would mess this up somehow so
    • Click in introduction
    • Select the paintbrush on the Home tab, Clipboard command group.
    • 
    • "Paint" Overview of Data
  • We can do the same for the subheaders.
    • Select The Super Heroes Dataset
      • Make it bold, and 12 point font.
    • Click somewhere in The Super Heroes Dataset
    • Double click on the paintbrush.
      • The paint brush is now persistent until you click on it again.
      • You can paint as much format as you wish.
• This is great, what is wrong with it.
  • This works nicely, but as documents grow, this would become a huge problem.
    • Mostly because you would most likely miss some sections.
  • So let's erase all the formatting.
  • Select the entire document
  • On the Home tab, select the Clear Formatting tool in the Font command group.
  • 
• So now apply a style.
  • Select the text of the title.
    • On the Home tab, in the Styles command group, select Title
  • Do the same for the subtitle
  • Set Introduction and Overview of the Data as Heading 1
  • Set the other headings as heading 2.
  • 
• So what! And I don't like blue headings.
  • Right click on Heading 1 in the styles area to bring up a drop down menu.
  • 
  • Select Modify
  • Change the Color to be black and click on OK.
  • What happened?
  • Do the same for Heading 2
  • Click and notice that the normal text is Normal
  • Modify the Normal text style to be double spaced.
• If there is no other reason to use document level formatting, the ease of formatting an entire document consistently justifies it's use.