Please Note: This article is written for users of the following Microsoft Word versions: 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. If you are using a later version (Word 2007 or later), this tip may not work for you. For a version of this tip written specifically for later versions of Word, click here: Creating a Table of Authorities.

Creating a Table of Authorities

Written by Allen Wyatt (last updated September 22, 2018)
This tip applies to Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003


In long legal documents, a table of authorities is often used to cite references to statutes, cases, and other sources for information referenced in the document. The table of authorities will cite the case or statute, along with the page number in the document on which the case or statute is referenced.

Word includes the ability to easily create a table of authorities. You do so by first marking citations within your document, and then instructing Word to compile the citations into your final table. As you are marking citations, you can specify both long and short versions of citations. For instance, a long citation may be something like "Smith v. Jones, 37 Adj. 3d 421 (1968)." The short version of the citation could be something like "Smith v. Jones" or even "Smith (1968)."

To mark citations, follow these steps:

  1. Select the long, full citation you want to use.
  2. Press Shift+Alt+I. Word displays the Mark Citation dialog box. (See Figure 1.)
  3. Figure 1. The Mark Citation dialog box.

  4. Make any editorial changes desired to the text in the Selected Text box.
  5. Using the drop-down Category list, select the category to which this citation belongs.
  6. In the Short Citation box, edit the text to reflect the short version of the citation.
  7. Click on Mark (to mark just the current, selected instance of the citation) or Mark All (to search the document and mark all instances).
  8. Click on Cancel.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (900) applies to Microsoft Word 97, 2000, 2002, and 2003. You can find a version of this tip for the ribbon interface of Word (Word 2007 and later) here: Creating a Table of Authorities.

Author Bio

Allen Wyatt

With more than 50 non-fiction books and numerous magazine articles to his credit, Allen Wyatt is an internationally recognized author. He is president of Sharon Parq Associates, a computer and publishing services company. ...

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