I'm a huge fan of using Google Docs to create my Genealogy
Research Reports and writing Projects. If you want to make
your Genealogy Research Reports look awesome blossom, then, be
sure to use these five skills to make it look fantastic. Now,
there are a lot of tools that you can use on Google Docs to
enhance the look of your research reports and your
research projects but I'm going to share with you five.
Be sure to check out the FHF extra channel membership or a
more in-depth video series that I will have just for members
only on how some other tips and tricks on improving the styling
and the look of your reports. My first technique is to
stylize headings. Not only do you want to have them different
sizes but you also want to be able to have them have
different fonts and colors. So, here I have a basic research
report. I've got something where it's going to be a title,
the objective, the background and the other elements that you
would expect to see in a research report and notice it's
not really stylized and it's rather boring. To stylize your
headings, we're going to go ahead and highlight a title and
then we're going to go to this normal text. I don't want
normal text. I want it to say title. Now, title is just a
default. You know, it's rather kind of boring but I'm going to
go ahead and adjust my title center it and then I can change
the font. One of my favorites is and then if I want to, I can
change the color and as you know, I'm a huge fan of maroon.
That one's the wrong kind of maroon and I can go like that.
Lots of other styling techniques that I can use right
there. So, what about these subheadings? So, let's do
subtitle one and subtitle two and subtitle three. Pretty
easy, right? However, let's say you're working on any of these
and you decide, you know, that's still kind of boring. I
would like to make it Oswald and I want to reduce the font.
Another thing you might want to do is maybe you have too much
line spacing around that heading to go to line and
paragraph skate spacing and you can click single and that just
reduces a little bit of the spacing down there. Make that a
capital I and let's say you want to give it a color as
well. So we're going to color oops not underline. Well you
could underline. Maybe you want it purple. I don't know. Let's
go ahead and put the underline there as well. Why not? Well if
you go like this and do a paint that works. If you make changes
to the setting style that you've already articulated,
then you have to go back and repaint every single one but
there's an easier way what I can do to make my life easier
and watch this. I'm going to have both of them at the same
time. I'm going to highlight this. I'm going to go to
heading. Um click on this heading and then, I'm going to
come down here to update heading to match and then, not
only was that one fixed, so is that one fixed and anytime I
add heading one Now, it looks like that. So, let's say I
want to make this heading one and then I change this to like
I don't really like the purple. I much rather have a green. The
other ones haven't changed. So, I have to go back to heading up
update heading to match and now they're all green. Now, you
shouldn't have to do anything extra in order to do up date
heading to Match. It should have already been built into
your program. If you don't have that in Google Docs, then do a
Google search for how do I do update heading to Match and
then there's Shumbutt if you will have a tool that you can
have but for me, I found that it is just built into this
program. I just never knew what it was for. Now, who likes to
see just a huge body of text with no formatting? Well, maybe
if it is from a genealogy book from the distant past then but
today, we have a way to enhance the look of our reports by
stylizing our content. So, one of the first things you you
might want to do with formatting your content is
definitely doing the same thing we did for the paragraph the
titles but also formatting your paraphs. You can do format,
line spacing, maybe you want one and a half between each
line or maybe you want it single spaced. Lots of there.
Another thing you can do is add space before a paragraph and
then if you had one or more paragraphs, you're going to see
that you have extra spacing between your paragraphs.
Another thing you could do to format your paragraphs is
actually format your titles and your paragraphs in one fill
swoop. So, highlight all of the sections that you want, click
on formats, line, and paragraph spacings and do keep with next.
So, what happens if you do a big section like that all of it
drops down and you have this big space if I didn't have that
keep with next and it add paragraphs notice that the
title and the first paragraph under that title splits so if
you want to keep the title and a first paragraph together then
highlight line spacing keep with next another thing you
might want to do is create list and list are fairly easy to
create let's say you want this right here to be a bulleted
list. Depending on how zoomed in you are. So, if we could
zoom out, one, two, you're going to see those three dots
and you can click on the bulleted list. I'm going to
zoom back in but you click on the bulleted list and now, I
have a bullet and anytime I add another line, it'll be a
bullet. Every time I hit enter, if you want to make a section
of text bulleted then you highlight those items and
anytime there is a line break it will become a bulleted list
if you decide I don't really want it to be bulleted I'd
rather it to be numbered you can click like that and there's
actually several different types of options that you can
have to change the look of your numbering system or your
bullets sometimes you want arrows those are kind of fun
now what's such a Genealogy reports or projects without
citations. So, let's talk about how to add footnotes to our
reports. Footnotes are fairly easy. You could do go to the
end of the line. Hit insert footnote or you can learn the
shortcut key of control all F or command all F and then it
automatically adds a number and you can add your citation and
then I'm going to do another citation. This time, I'm using
the quick reference and notice I have number one and number
two. So, there's number two and number one is in the middle of
the paragraph right here but let's say I want to add another
citation in front of the one. What's really great is Google
Docs will keep track of your numbers and it'll just push
everything down for you.
So, now this becomes a three, this is two, and that's one and
if you decide, oh, I'd rather want it down here, notice that
it automatically ships your citation numbers. I love this
feature. Now, let's say you don't like the default setting
of the caption. So, there really isn't a way to change
the formatting of the captions. So, let's go ahead and change
the format. I typically don't like my citations more than 8
point fonts. Aerial is okay let's say just for the fun of
it you wanted to have don't ever use this don't ever use
this for a citation but maybe you wanted to have be cursive
why not you you get the idea that it's different it's
different from the default so there's really no way to fix
the citations other than doing it that manually and that
includes highlighting highlighting what you want
hitting the paint bucket or roller highlighting what you
want change and then it will change but there's an easier
way and it involves something called an add on. Click on add
on. Go to get add ons and then you're going to search for
footnote style. Now, I already have this installed but walk
through the process of installing this onto your
computer and what can happen is you can highlight the formatted
citation that you want every other citation to look like.
Click on add ons, footnote style, match footnotes to style
selection. That means I've highlighted the style I want
all of them to look like. Click on that and notice without any
extra steps, all citations has changed to this format. If I
want to change it to verdana which is like Ariel. It's just
a different way look for Ariel. Again, highlight, add on match
but not so style and there we go. There we go. Quick and
easy. If you have Hudson's threads and hundreds of
citation, this is a a life saver. Oh my gosh. When I did a
research report that had 300 citations, and I wanted them
all to be eight point font, I had to go and format every
single one and it was a paint in the keyster. So, go ahead
and use that match citations and it will shrink it. Now, be
advised if you are using any atalicizing in your program,
then, those atalicizing might shift and you might have to go
back and do a atalisizing again but I really, really, really
like this. It's pretty handy. Now, whenever you have a
graphic and image or a photograph, you'll probably
want to add them to your report and the one naked thing about
Google is they don't have an easy way to caption your images
but I'll show you a quick hack that's going to help you out.
So, what you're going to do is instead of inserting image,
we're going to insert a drawing. Click on insert
drawing new. So, now that this is open, I'm going to click
image and I'm going to search for my image and I'm going to
select it and it gets dropped right down in here. So, then,
I'm going to do is I'm going to do a text box below it and draw
just something to start with. I like how it will pop up a
little red guideline to say, hey, this is in line with the
picture above. So, then, I can type in my caption and I can
click save and close and it will truncate to not it's got
that extra drawing space. It's going to truncate to just
what's there and then I can do right click wrap text and now I
have my captioned image. Another thing you're going to
do is maybe you made a misspelling. You can click edit
and you can come right up back in here and change the yeah a
misspelled geistler and go figure. Just go ahead and
change it. Click save and close and you still always have the
editing capability for that. You can also expand your image
decrease your image and have the text wrap. I just want to
Point out that you want to make sure that your caption is a
different font type and a different font size than the
word around it. So, I think this is a little bit too large.
So, I'm going to decrease this to eight just because it's a
larger font. The letters are larger in eight, 9, and 10
compared to aerial. So, now you can see that there definitely a
difference between the two. Now, how many of you are
considering just creating a bibliography for your project?
Did you know that Google Docs has a citation and biblio tool.
I didn't until I started researching this video. So, I
definitely want to tell you show you about it. Come to the
end of your work. Go to tools, citation, and then select the
format. There's MLA, APA, and Chicago. So, we're going to do
Chicago and we're going to choose from these options book
and I can do print, website, online database. So, I can
complete all the forms. There's lots of different choices here.
I'm going to add a title, I mean an author, a title,
go through and I think I'm done. So, I can add a citation.
So, I can just corral all of my sources that I use and then
when I'm done, I can just do insert the references and there
all of my references are going to be compiled on my
bibliography down there at the bottom. So, those are just some
of the really cool tools that you can use to enhance the look
of your report using Google Docs for your genealogy
project. If you have any other further suggestions, also use
that comment section below and I can't wait to talk to you
about your future writing project. If you want more to
and tricks on how to write your Family History Stories. Be sure
to check out the playlist that's up above and if you're
ready for something new, check out that one. Text wrapping. I
can recolor it. Let's say I want it red. Okay, I don't
really want it red but you can change some of the colors.