Introduction

Microsoft Office Word 2003 has many additional features that help you develop a more technical document. Research papers, business proposals and the like, all require more than just a document with some graphics or special text formatting.

You can find research material and incorporate it into your work quickly and easily. You can access informational services and insert the material right into your document without leaving Word. Material such as dictionaries, thesauruses, research sites, language translations, stock quotes, and company information are all at your finger tips.

With all of this research, it might be necessary to create footnotes or endnotes to reference your sources. You can format the notes to be similar in text to your document, or have an entirely different look. When working with a lot of text, you can create a bookmark to help you jump to various topics in your document.

Creating captions for your graphics is easy with Word. Once you've created captions, you can create a Table of Figures ”similar to a Table of Contents, but this item keeps track of your graphics. You can format text in your document to have number lines. This is helpful if you need to locate a specific section of text ”such as a legal briefing ”in a long document. You can also create an outline in Word to help organize your document.

Some more technical features such as summing up the values in your tables and calculating values, are done with the help of Word's Formula feature. You can also document an equation for that scientific or mathematical paper. The ability to copy data from Excel, create a graph or organization chart, and create a diagram are all features that help make Word a useful tool when creating more technical documents.