I think I mentioned earlier that I’ve gone back to school at Colorado Technical University (CTU). So that means I’m going to have to write lots of papers, and at CTU those papers have to follow APA guidelines (http://www.apastyle.org/). At this point 75% of the time I’ve spent writing my first paper was trying to make sure I adhered to APA guidelines. As I was researching APA, I found a link from CTU’s Virtual Library to a tutorial on setting up Microsoft Word in APA Style (http://www.cameron.edu/library/apa_word_tutorial.html). The problem was the school sent everybody a copy of Office 2007, and the tutorial looks like it was written for Word 2000. I managed to figure it out but I thought I’d throw together my own updated version of their tutorial to help those using APA Style in Word 2007 (i.e. my classmates). Note that this is just a slightly modified version of the tutorial I found.
Layout:
Click Page Layout:
Open the Page Setup Dialog Box:
Check that margins are one inch on the top, bottom, left, and right sides. Click OK.
Go to the Layout tab and make sure the header and footer are 0.5 inches.
Click Home. Now Open the Paragraph Dialog Box:
Change your Line Spacing to Double. Click OK.
Go back to the Paragraph Dialog Box.
Click the Tabs button and set Default Tab Stops to 0.5 inches. Click OK.
Change your font to Times New Roman and your font size to 12 point.
Now you can save these setting by pressing Ctrl-Alt-Shift-S to open the Styles Dialog Box.
Click New Style. Verify your settings are they way you want them. Change the name to APA-Style. Check New Documents based on this style. Click OK.
Click Insert then click Header then Blank.
Go back to Home, then Align Right.
Type the first 2 or 3 words of your title. Insert five spaces then go to Design. Click on Page Numbers, go down to Current Position, Plain Number.
Now click on Close Header and Footer.
You will still need to add the Header for each new document, but from this point forward when you start a new document just click APA Style in the Styles section.
The rest of the tutorial I found is the same no matter which version of Office you use, so I won’t go into that, just check go read the original at http://www.cameron.edu/library/apa_word_tutorial.html.
The only thing to note is in the References section at the end. To setup a Hanging Indent highlight the entire reference section, align left, then go to the Page Layout tab, open the Paragraph Dialog Box. Under the Indentation section change Special from None to Hanging.
Warning: I’m not an expert on APA, so this isn’t a definitive guide by any means. It’s only an update to the guide I found that shows you where to find the menus and dialog boxes that aren’t in the same places in Word 2007 that they were in Word 2000.
I’m sure this is all boring and not worth reading for most of you, but I’ll probably refer back to it myself regularly.
