Hello and welcome back to another tutorial on Microsoft Word. In this tutorial, you are going to learn how to insert figure and table captions in Microsoft Word.
Why you should use Figure Captions
First of all, a caption is to give readers a brief idea of what the image or a figure is about within a few words. If your document contains various figures like Charts, Graphs, and a series of images then you must have to give your readers a brief idea of what the charts, graphs, and images are about. In Word without using the caption tool, you have to insert captions by manually creating a text box or just by typing under the figure. In that case that will be time-consuming and hazardous if you want to rearrange your figures and texts. By using the caption tool, no matter how many times you rearrange your figures the captions will stick to the figures or images.
Let’s jump into the tutorial now. Go through the below steps.
- First Click the Figure or Image you want to insert a caption to.
- Click the References tab in the ribbon above. Under this tab from the Captions, section click Insert Captions. A caption dialogue box will appear. Alternatively, you can directly open this box with the keyboard shortcut key: Alt+S+P.
- Under Options select Label and Position from the drop-down lists. You will get three default labels that are Equation, Figure & Table. You can create your own label by hitting the New Label button and then typing your own Label in the Label box. The new Label will be added to the drop-down list of Labels. For Position, you will get two default options that are below the selected item and above the selected item.
- Type your caption next to the default label in the Caption field.
- Click Ok. Your caption will appear in the image and will stick to the image wherever you rearrange it.
How to delete Caption in Word
To delete a caption just select the caption text and press delete. Your caption will be deleted and you can add a new caption by following the same process above.
That’s all about adding and deleting captions in Microsoft Word. However to have ideas from credible sources you can visit the Microsoft Support Page.
Some Important Usage of Figure Caption
Charts & Graphs
Some reports need charts and graphs to present financial data with analysis. For example, reports may include pie charts to present market shares of the companies, bar charts to present the company’s growth compared to previous years, and graphs to present Company’s growth trend. Reports with few charts and graphs may not need captions. But when it comes to many charts and graphs then you must have to use captions to give your readers a brief idea about each graph. Furthermore, you should add a table of figures at the end of the report to avoid unnecessary confusion and to help your readers to find out which figures represent what aspect. Without captions, your reader will lose coordination and will get lost among the similar-looking charts.
Relevant Photos
There are some reports that contain several different product photos, Images of different or relevant sites (production site, distribution site, and so on), and photos that present any events like annual conferences, customer get-togethers,s, etc. A report with too many photos should add captions with each photo. Though from the title or from the body the reader can have an idea of what the photo is about but using a caption will help the reader to understand the photo subject while they will take a quick look at the whole report by scrolling or just a few turns. On the other hand as a reporter, it will benefit you to edit and to make some rearrangements in figures.
Tables
As mentioned earlier reports may include too many tables to arrange in order. Though from the table title the readers can get an idea about the table content but some extra information, footnotes and postscripts may need to be added somewhere out of the table. And best way to do that is to add a caption beneath the tables. For example, after showing sales data in the table you can mention in the caption which products were excluded from the data. And another thing is to note here that if you use the caption above the table you can use it as a table title. The procedure of adding captions to tables is the same. Just select the table and go to References >> Insert Caption. In the caption box there will be automatically shown “Table 1”. After the text “Table 1” you can type your own caption.
Video: How to insert Figure Caption in Word