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Navigation Aids for Long Word Documents (4)
Creating a Table of Authorities

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A table of Authorities (TOA) is useful when you have to cite cases, rules, statutes, constitutional language, treaties or other documents in legal documents. The TOA will show each such reference and its document location.

To create a TOA, your document must first contain reference names or citations that are specially marked as such. Once you have inserted all of the marks, Word will arrange all the marked text in a list similar to a TOC.

In addition, you should refer to a citation completely the first time you use it in a document. Then you can refer to it elsewhere by a shorter name. For example, the first reference to a legal case might be "Hatfield v. McCoy, 66 Can 2d 216 (1993)" while the shorter version would simply be "Hatfield v. McCoy". When you mark all of the citations in your document, you can tell Word to search and mark both the long and short forms of the citation, and you can edit the citation names that appear in the TOA if you like.

Using the Mark Citation Dialog Box

To mark citations in a document, you can use the 'Mark Citation' dialog box by following the steps below:

1. Select the first occurrence of a citation in your document (the long version) and press <Alt> , <Shift> and <I> keys simultaneously to open the dialog box. Or you can open the box by choosing 'Index and Tables' from the 'Insert' menu, clicking the 'Table of Authorities' tab and then the 'Mark Citation' button.

2. Your selected text will appear in the 'Selected Text:' box and in the 'Short citation:' box. The 'Selected Text:' box shows the way the text will appear in the TOA when created; however, you can edit it to change the way it will appear in the table, if you like.

3. Edit the text in the 'Short Citation' box to match the shorter version of the citation in your document. For example, if the short version is 'Hatfield v. McCoy', you need to delete the case, the court number and the date from the end of the text.

4. Choose an authority category from the 'Category' list. The category name will appear in bold in the TOA and above the list of references selected for that category.

5. You can also choose from predefined category names or add new ones of your own by clicking the 'Category' button to open the 'Edit Category' dialog box, selecting an existing category from the list, typing a replacement name, clicking the 'Replace' button and then the 'OK' button.

6. Click the 'Mark' button. Word will then insert a 'Table Entry' field next to the citation in your document. To hide the field, just click the Show/Hide( '?')button on the Standard toolbar.

7. The 'Mark Citation' dialog box will remain open so that you can select and mark lots of different citations. Click in your document to select other citations, and then click in the dialog box to reactivate it. You can also drag it around your screen to reveal text if necessary.

8. When finished, just click the 'Close' button on the top right corner of the box to put it away.

Next time I will tell you how to mark all the rest of the citations in a document by the shorter name, how to select a format and create a table and how to update the table.

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(Email address: 'Daniel_KC_To@police.gov.hk')