captionimagesmicrosoft word
This should be a common problem for anyone involved in technical writing.
When you insert an image (or table etc.) caption in Word, you get this dialog. You enter your caption, in this case "A happy bicycle" (in yellow).
This might be fine for a happy bicycle, but I want to have captions that have one style for the "enumeration" (label and number) and one style for the description (caption text, as called by Word), as such:
I have tried searching for this but I haven't found anything yet…
It turns out the solution to this problem in Word 2003 and later is to use something called “style separators”. Style separators are hidden characters that are functionally paragraph separators, but they don't cause a line break; like this:
The quick brown fox│̲̅¶̲̅│jumps over the lazy dog.¶
They allow a paragraph — or rather, what appears to be a single paragraph — to have multiple paragraph styles. This is analogous to the way a “section break (continuous)” is a section separator that doesn't cause a page break, thus allowing a page to have multiple section formats.
Firstly, make sure you have enabled viewing hidden characters.
To insert a style separator in Word 2007 use the keystrokes Ctrl+Alt+Enter, or add the “Style separator” command to the Quick Access Toolbar from the “All Commands” set (or the “Commands Not in the Ribbon” set). When you insert a style separator, it will be added at the end of the paragraph in which the cursor is placed. Move it to the point at which you would like your caption to be split.
Or, in other words (or not?), at least in Word 2013 and 2016, “insert style separator” is a misnomer. This function (shortcut/button) simply changes the following paragraph marker (at the end of the current paragraph) from a standard paragraph mark into a style separator, thus joining two paragraphs into what looks like a single paragraph. The best way to work with this might be to type Enter where you want to break the paragraph, then click to the left of the new paragraph mark and use the shortcut.
Don't forget to select all (Ctrl+A) and then update field codes F9 to make sure your changes get propagated into the table of figures.
Best Answer
When you insert the caption, the entire caption block, both the "header" and the caption's text, are given a single style:
Caption. Amending this style will allow you to change all your captions (depending on how you do it, this can be document specific or not), past and present.To have the header and text appear differently you will need to manually (or maybe there's a macro about to help with this...?) add additional styling to either the header or caption.
What I've done before is to create a new style derived from ("based on")
Caption, which has the single effect of adding bold (for example) then, because it is derived, future changes toCaptionwill cascade to the header as well. It's hardly perfect, and requires manually tweaking each caption as you create them to add the style to the "header", but it has worked for me in the past.