Hack your Word documents with VBA

Tom Bergan, one of my grad school buddies, had the bright idea of writing a little lint script for our LaTeX papers. The script would use grep to find various inconsistencies in our papers, e.g., times when we said “non-determinism” instead of “nondeterminism”, didn’t follow “e.g.” with a comma, and other small, domain-specific semantic errors. It worked great and kept our writing more consistent than we ever could have done by hand.

Figures with captions in Microsoft Word

Figures are an important part of writing a technical document. Figures with captions are even better, because then you can refer to them from the text! Since I decided to write my dissertation in Word, I had to figure out how to do captioned figures. Word offers many ways to do this, and the most obvious ways don’t really work that well! Fortunately, I found a way that does work – using a somewhat-hidden feature called “frames.” For the record, my experience is with Word 2011 (on Mac).

Writing a Dissertation in Microsoft Word

A little while back I decided to write my dissertation in Microsoft Word instead of the venerable LaTeX. I’d used LaTeX exclusively for papers and was looking to try something new. I’d seen friends use Word for technical papers, and plenty of people on the Internet were using Word for their dissertations, so why not me?