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About this lesson

Learn to create and link captions to images and text.

Lesson versions

Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:

2013, 2016, 2019/365.

Exercise files

Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.

Using Captions.docx
2.4 MB Using Captions - Solution.docx
2.4 MB

Quick reference

Captions

Learn to create and link captions to images and text

When to use

Captions are commonly known as the descriptions under photos.  But they are also a technical cross-reference tool that will link document text to the caption. Finally, captions can be gathered into a “Table of Figures”, similar to a Table of Contents, with page number references

Instructions

Add a caption to a photo

  1. Click the first picture in the document, and then click the References Ribbon, Captions group.
  2. Enter the text you would like to appear under the picture.
  3. Change the Label and Position if desired.
  4. Click OK

Create a cross reference within the text to the Figure

  1. Click into your text and place the insertion point where you want the cross reference link to appear.
  2. Click the References Ribbon, Captions group, Cross Reference
  3. Make sure the Reference type shows “Figure” and choose from the list compiled from your already captioned pictures.
  4. Click Insert

Create a Table of Figures

  1. Click into your document and place the insertion point where you want the Table of Figures to appear.
  2. Click the References Ribbon, Captions group, Insert Table of Figures. 
  3. The default settings are usually fine, click OK
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  • 00:04 Hello, in this lesson you're going to learn about captions.
  • 00:08 Captions are generally the descriptions under photos, but
  • 00:11 they're also a cross reference tool in Microsoft Word.
  • 00:15 And so when you set these up properly, they're called figures.
  • 00:19 When you set up captions underneath pictures and
  • 00:21 the captions will say figure, or table, or equation.
  • 00:25 Then you can cross reference to text and finally build what
  • 00:28 is called a Table of Figures at the beginning or end of your document.
  • 00:32 So let's go ahead and click on the first flower picture.
  • 00:35 Now I do want to,
  • 00:36 on the home ribbon, I want you to turn on your Show/Hide button right here.
  • 00:40 Cuz there's gonna be some things happening inside this document.
  • 00:43 And I want you to actually see all the codes in the background and
  • 00:46 watch what's happening, while we apply some of these features.
  • 00:49 All right, so again,
  • 00:50 click on that first picture of the flower, go to your References ribbon.
  • 00:55 Right over here in the caption group, we're gonna go ahead and Insert Caption.
  • 00:59 It comes up with Figure 1, it's waiting for me to type something in there.
  • 01:03 I'm just gonna put a comma, and I'm gonna type flower.
  • 01:06 I'm gonna leave this as a figure, but you can change that to Equation or
  • 01:09 Table, and you can position it.
  • 01:12 Right now it's automatically gonna go below the text, but
  • 01:14 I could tell it above the text, or the picture, the selected item.
  • 01:18 If I don't like figure, table,
  • 01:20 or equation, I can type in New Label and call it something different, maybe photo.
  • 01:24 I'll go ahead and cancel that and hit OK.
  • 01:27 And there we have it.
  • 01:28 Figure 1, Flower.
  • 01:29 Now notice, it put a hard return in here and
  • 01:32 my other two pictures jumped down below it.
  • 01:34 That is just the way it happens because the caption has to be entered below
  • 01:38 the picture, so
  • 01:39 they put a hard return there, otherwise it wouldn't know where to put it.
  • 01:43 So I could live with that, and if I want to change that,
  • 01:47 I could format my picture, and I could tell the text to wrap around that picture.
  • 01:52 Instead of being in line with text and having it go above and below.
  • 01:55 But it's fine for now, for this purpose.
  • 01:58 Let's go ahead and click on the next picture, which is a picture of the desert.
  • 02:01 Come right up here to Insert Caption, I'm going to type desert,
  • 02:06 and I'm going to hit OK.
  • 02:07 I'll let everything stay automated, and the koala picture jumped down below
  • 02:11 because the system automatically put a hard return there.
  • 02:15 All right, one last one.
  • 02:16 Let's go ahead and do a comma koala, koala there we go.
  • 02:22 And hit OK on this one.
  • 02:24 And the three figures are all labeled, the captions are in place.
  • 02:28 Now we're going to cross reference those to our text.
  • 02:31 So right down here in the links I've got, let's see, links to the flower picture.
  • 02:35 So I'm gonna highlight this, underline right here, and
  • 02:38 in the same caption group I'm going to click Cross-reference.
  • 02:42 Now when that comes up, already, it's searching for anything marked as figure.
  • 02:46 Had I used table, or equation, or bookmarks, or anything else,
  • 02:49 it would come up here.
  • 02:50 But I'm linking to figures, and I wanna insert a hyperlink, so
  • 02:55 we're gonna go ahead and click on flowers, so hit Insert.
  • 02:59 Now, the box stays open, which is fine, but what happened in the background,
  • 03:04 when I highlight this, this dark gray area is the field that just popped in there.
  • 03:08 So I'll do this again right over here, but I'll leave this box so
  • 03:12 we can actually see what's going on.
  • 03:14 So, I'm going to insert the cross reference to the desert.
  • 03:19 So I highlight that tiny little line, come right over here, click desert,
  • 03:23 hit Insert and watch what happens to that gray area.
  • 03:26 There, it just threw in Figure 2, desert.
  • 03:28 Now, of course, it looks like it smashed the word picture and Figure together,
  • 03:32 just click in there and put a space bar, that's fine.
  • 03:35 And now we're gonna do this last one, koala.
  • 03:37 I'm gonna go ahead and highlight the line there, where I want this to be placed, and
  • 03:42 I'm gonna just click right in here to koala.
  • 03:44 I love that this box stays open.
  • 03:46 Saves me a little bit of work getting it back.
  • 03:48 And I'm gonna go ahead and close this box now.
  • 03:51 So now I have,
  • 03:51 in this paragraph apply the cross reference links to the flower picture, and
  • 03:54 there's Figure 1, the desert picture, Figure 2, and the koala picture, Figure 3.
  • 03:59 Yes, it would be appropriate to put commas there,
  • 04:01 please fix your punctuation as needed.
  • 04:04 Now the beauty is, when I float my mouse over,
  • 04:05 it says Ctrl+Click to follow the link.
  • 04:08 So when I click this,
  • 04:08 it should take me exactly to the desert picture, Ctrl+Click, and it does.
  • 04:13 It takes me right up here to the desert picture.
  • 04:15 All right, the last thing would be inserting a Table of
  • 04:18 Figures cuz these are figures in the captions.
  • 04:21 Again, that is on the References ribbon in the Captions area.
  • 04:25 Insert a Table of Figures.
  • 04:26 I first clicked where I want the Table of Figures to land.
  • 04:29 Click on Table of Figures, I'm just gonna leave all the settings the same.
  • 04:33 Hit OK, and there you go.
  • 04:35 So, we have three pictures with captions.
  • 04:39 The captions are called figures, and
  • 04:41 all of those will link within our text into fields.
  • 04:45 And all of those will come together in a Table of Figures at the bottom or
  • 04:49 top of your document, wherever you choose to have that land.
  • 04:52 And that is how and why you use captions.
  • 04:56 All right, please practice that exercise.

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