Question on Word document formating

[Mike Lowe]

I have a document (basically a big table) on a network drive for my students. It's basically a grid that they will be using to collect sources for a research paper.

What usually happens with these is that as students add in their information, the table starts to get added to additional sheets and all clean formating goes out the window.

I tried using the insert key but to no avail...what I'm trying to do is have each cell never change size...is this just something where I need to "shrink text" for all cells?

Is the best approach? I just know not all of my students are savvy enough to keep this clean for themselves and I'd rather they not waste paper, etc. printing it.

[Matthean]

Why not use Word's default tools for adding sources?

[Mike Lowe]

Originally Posted by Matthean

Why not use Word's default tools for adding sources?

Thanks Matthean, but I'm not familiar. Care to elaborate?

Thank you!

[Mike Lowe]

I'm giving this a bump because I'm not asking students to create a bibliography just yet, instead I'm just having them copy information from the internet to a document (stats, interesting quotes, etc. to use in their future research paper), and would like the formatting in the Word document table cell sizes to remain consistent and not start stretching across multiple pages, etc.

[CraigSca]

Maybe he's referring to the "References" section on the main menu of Microsoft Word (?). I've never used it (and I'm looking at Word 2007, so I know it's not up to date). There is an option under there that reads "Manage Sources"...

[Matthean]

Originally Posted by CraigSca

Maybe he's referring to the "References" section on the main menu of Microsoft Word (?). I've never used it (and I'm looking at Word 2007, so I know it's not up to date). There is an option under there that reads "Manage Sources"...

Gah. I forgot about this, but yes, this. I learned Word best on 2010. I had a class on it about a year ago and it wasn't too bad to use.

[Mike Lowe]

Yeah again, I'm not worried about actual sources/bibliography. Think of a basic cell inside of a table. I want the size of that cell (height/width) to remain the same no matter what I type in there. I've used the right-click menu to try and use the "autofit to window" option, but as I type and hit enter, etc. the cell just gets taller and taller as I go. I'd prefer the text to just shrink to fit, but don't see a way to apply this to all of the table cells on Word 2010.