Producing a thesis or dissertation using Word – Celebrating one of our longest running courses!
‘Producing a thesis or dissertation using Word’ is one of the Digital Skills Team’s longest running courses. At over 24 years old, it pre-dates the team itself, and is older than many of the people attending it!
But just how long has it been running? We don’t know for certain, but research in the BITS Archive[1] and the Internet Archive[2] shows that the EUCS Training Team had dates scheduled for it in 2002[3]. A course workbook on the internet archive is dated August 2001 and is already in its 6th edition[4], so we can assume it had already been running for several years by then. The course was transferred to the Digital Skills Team (originally IS Skills Development) when it was formed in 2010, and it continues to be one of our most popular courses to this day.
The course has run 153 times since October 2010, with a total of 1,781 attendees – an average of 11.6 people per session. Originally only running on-campus, in 2020 it moved online, and we now have both on-campus and online dates every semester to allow students to choose to attend the format they prefer. The highest ever attendance was 53 people at an online course on 25/2/25!
The course covers best practice advice for managing a large document in Word, followed by demonstrations of Word’s features that can be particularly helpful when writing longer documents, along with plenty of time for attendees to ask questions. Features that are covered include:
- Working with styles
- Numbering headings
- Adding captions to images and tables
- Working with sections
- Adding headers, footers and page numbers
- Automatic tables of content
- Assembling individual chapters into a single document
It runs for two hours and is available for all students to book on Event Booking.
As well as the course itself, a comprehensive range of learning materials are available on our Documents Catalogue for students to refer back to after the session, or for self-paced learning for students unable to attend a synchronous course. The materials include:
- Recordings using both Word for Windows and macOS
- A comprehensive workbook of all the topics covered
- Course slides
- Practice files to try out the features demonstrated at the course
- Thesis outlines for students to use to start writing
The course consistently gets excellent feedback from attendees, with some recent comments including:
“It’s an essential session with my work. Thank you for your session.” 2/10/24
“Great course! It was very useful.” 2/10/24
“I learnt a lot about formatting images, captions, section breaks and putting in table of contents, which I didn’t know before. Thanks for running this very useful course.” 2/12/24
“Thank you so much for arranging this session, it’s really helpful!!” 23/1/25
“It was perfect, thank you so much!” 18/3/25
We hope that this course continues to help future generations of students learn about Word’s features and save themselves time when writing their thesis or dissertation, therefore allowing them to concentrate on their academic work.
Book a place on the course on Event Booking
[1] Preserving BITs – An Online Exhibition Featuring the Digital Preservation of a Central IT Bulletin at the University of Edinburgh; University of Edinburgh Archive and Manuscript Collections – BITS magazine and predecessors, 1994-2004
[2] Bulletin of IT Services on the Internet Archive, July 17th 2001
[3] Producing a Thesis course description and dates on the Internet Archive, November 23rd 2002
[4]Producing a Thesis or Dissertation using Word Workbook on the Internet Archive, November 7th 2002
