Figure on Using Figures (Captions) in Word Documents

Happy New Year!

I will start off the New Year with a Blog Post; it was on my list of New Year's Resolutions!

Recently I did some Access consulting and training for the Grand County, CO Sheriff's Office.  After the training I was asked to put together a User Manual (Word Document) to document what I had covered in a hands on training class.

I was specifically asked to 'include screen shots', ie figures (pictures) of the computer screen (or parts thereof) to visually show what someone would be looking at while working with, in this case, an Access database using Access.

I realized that there could be many "screen shots" (30 or more) and wanted to make my life easy in being able to manage these screen shots while creating the document.  Here was my chance to use "Insert Caption" in Word and use Figures.  As I figured (no pun intended) this could also be good subject matter to blog and resolve my Resolution...

First of all, how did I get my "screen shots"?  I used One Note which is a nice Microsoft Application (comes with certain Office Suites) that allows copying parts or all of a screen view and then being able to manage these "clips".  A "clip" from One Note can be copied and pasted into Word (or any other place with a paste command).  Of course the other option to capture a "screen shot" is simply to click the "Print Screen" button on your keyboard.  This copies the screen (the entire screen) to the clipboard.  The Print Screen image can then be pasted into Word (or any other place with a paste command).  Other than a "screen shot" one could use a picture (Insert, Picture).

So I begin creating my Word Document...type, type, type....then it I think, "hey, what a great place for a screen shot".  So I switch windows to the window that I want in a screen shot and either "Print Screen" or use One Note to capture a clip and copy.  I switch back to Word and Paste and end up with a copy of the screen shot or clip (picture).  Of course there are a lot of formatting options (like resize, wrapping options, crop, etc that could be pursued (which I won't go into in this discussion).

Once the screen shot (picture) is pasted into the document it could be setup as a Figure.  With the
picture selected, on the References Tab, Captions Command Group, click Insert Caption.  In the Captions dialog box you now have several options about the Caption.  First of all select the Label (Table, Figure, Picture, Equation) option, in this case I used "Figure".  Notice a Caption is automatically produced with the number being based on its order in the document, ie the first Figure will say "Figure 1" (or Table 1, etc).  Add any information to the caption such as "Screen shot of Access".  Choose Position (above or below pic) and click OK (yes, a few other options I didn't go into). 

You can now reference the Figure in the document.  To do such, click where you want a reference (such as "See Figure 1").  Type "See"  and then click Cross Reference in the Captions Command Group.  Choose the Reference Type (Figure) (a list of Figures will be in the bottom of the window as choices), choose the appropriate Figure to reference.  You can choose an Insert Reference To: option such as "Only Label and Number".  Click Insert and a reference will be generated like "See Figure 1", the "Figure 1" being a Field Code.  By default the reference is also a hyperlink, just Ctrl+Click the reference and you go to the Figure.

The Figure values will automatically be updated when adding a new Figure to the document.  If a Figure is added before Figure 1, the new Figure will be 1 and all others will be updated.  References in the document like "See Figure 1"can be updated by right clicking the Field Code (as mentioned above) and choose update.

So if you figure on figuring to use Figures (or Tables, Pictures, Equations), the Word feature "Insert Caption" could be quite handy.

Have fun in the meantime until next time,  Joel