Stumprider (or other grad students)

“Just had to let off a little steam...

I passed my final oral defense 5 months ago. Commencement 4 months ago. I am just now printing off my final-final manuscript after two rounds of modifications and two rounds with the "Format Police".

My biggest aggravations have been with MSWord and APA format. You cannot use MSWord to do many of the things you need for APA format. MSWord keeps changing things on me and pagination can be a real bummer.

Anyway, didn't know how far along you were with your manuscript. The fact that I had 20 tables, 54 figures, and Appendices A-J didn't help.

There...now I have to change the color cartridge in my printer...it never ends.”

“I'm not using APA, UC has their own style. I've been fighting MS Word with formating, too. Pardon my language, but MS Word SUCKS when it comes to formating. Wordperefect does a much better job with formating. But seeing I MUST use Word, I've split my dissertation into 3 files. Text, figures & tables, and Appendix because Word doesn't seem to handle the combination of figures and text. That means that I have to change page numbers and manually insert tables and figures where I want them. A real pain, but haven't found a work-around! (Thank you Mr. Gates!)

Best & lots of luck!”

“Sadly, MS Word was not designed for academia, mostly business applications. It would be nice if "Mr. Gates" would produce a product for us. It is like using a Metric tools to work on a car with English sized nuts and bolts.

I did use a software package called "Endnote" for my references. I started building my endnote reference library my last year of courses. That was a tremendous help...until they changed the format for APA 5th edition.”