Another good way to organize your document is to add captions. Captions are text under pictures, charts, graphs, or other graphics that give you a brief description of what that picture is. They can also provide a good reference point for your reader, so that when your document says “Refer to Figure 1” they know where Figure 1 is. The great thing about using Word to create captions is that they are automatically numbered and updated like other reference points.

 

To start, you can either select the graphic you want to add a caption to or place your cursor in the location you want the caption to appear. Then, click the Insert menu, choose Reference, and click Caption. You’ll see the dialog box pictured on the right pop up on your screen.

 

The first text box lets you type in the caption; you can’t edit the label or the number (in the sample, it’s “Figure 1”) from this text box.

 

You can, however, use the Label drop-down menu to choose another word (Equation, Figure, or Table) to place before your text. You can also check the “Exclude label from caption” box to just have your graphics numbered. Or, click the New Label button to create your own label.

 

If you’ve selected the graphic before opening the caption dialog box, you’ll be able to choose the position of the caption from the Position drop-down menu. (If this choice is grayed out, you’ll have to position your caption manually later on.)

 

If you want to modify the format of the numbers in the caption, you can click the Numbering button to choose a format (Roman, Arabic, or letters) and set chapter numbering.

 

You can also click the AutoCaption button to tell Word when it should automatically caption inserted graphics.

 

Once you’re done setting your options, click OK to have it applied:

 

 

In the sample above, you can see that the caption probably isn’t where we want it. Luckily, captions are automatically placed in text boxes, so it’s easy to drag and drop them where they belong:

 

 

You can move the caption in this way at any time, and you can also edit the text by clicking in the caption. If you delete the caption, other captions will be renumbered to fill in the gap and make numbering continuous.