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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 In this lesson I'd like to show you how to use captions, also known as figures.
  • 00:10 So first of all, I do have three little pictures right up here, and
  • 00:14 I want the name of whatever that picture is below it.
  • 00:17 So in the References section there's a Captions group, and
  • 00:21 in here I have Insert Caption.
  • 00:22 Now notice, I have already clicked on the first picture, I'll go ahead and
  • 00:26 click on Insert Caption, and, although it looks tiny,
  • 00:29 I am gonna type the word flower right there.
  • 00:31 The label will be a picture, I'm sorry, a figure.
  • 00:35 But notice you do have options to change that and
  • 00:38 the position can be above or below.
  • 00:40 I'll leave it below and hit OK.
  • 00:42 Now what happened was is it put the name, the caption, right under the picture and
  • 00:47 it moved the other pictures down, which is fine.
  • 00:50 I can accept that.
  • 00:51 If I want to change the layout, I could change the layout with this little button
  • 00:54 right here, but I'm gonna leave it right now for this example.
  • 00:58 All right, let's click on the desert picture.
  • 01:00 Right back up to my Insert Caption.
  • 01:03 This time I'm gonna call this one Desert and hit OK.
  • 01:07 Pushes the koala picture underneath.
  • 01:09 Go ahead and click on the koala, Insert Caption, and
  • 01:11 this time I'm gonna type Koala.
  • 01:13 All right, now that I've got my captions on the actual figures,
  • 01:17 I’m going to set up my cross reference to these because this is within my document.
  • 01:23 So, again on the References in the Caption group we have we have Cross Reference.
  • 01:27 When I click Cross Reference, here is the list of the ones I’ve already made.
  • 01:33 So it just wants to know, reference type,
  • 01:36 notice a long list, since I'm working with figures.
  • 01:39 It doesn't say captions there, figures.
  • 01:41 And I wanna have the entire caption listed.
  • 01:44 I'll hit OK, and of course I chose the flower.
  • 01:46 Okay, so now this little box stays open, which is actually kinda nice.
  • 01:50 It might seem like a little bit of a problem, but it's okay.
  • 01:54 You can work around it.
  • 01:55 Now this time I'm gonna caption me desert picture, and
  • 01:58 this time I'm gonna caption the koala picture.
  • 02:01 So I'm just highlighting the line that's there.
  • 02:03 Choosing the reference and hitting OK and close this.
  • 02:07 There they are.
  • 02:08 Now when I float my mouse back up here, when I click on it once it turns grey.
  • 02:11 That means it is a field.
  • 02:14 Fields have powers, okay?
  • 02:16 In this case, when I float my mouse here it says Ctrl+click to follow the link.
  • 02:20 So if you wanna see what this is referring to, Ctrl+click.
  • 02:23 See it works.
  • 02:24 If I printed this on paper, you wouldn't be able to do it of course,
  • 02:26 but in electronic document format you can.
  • 02:30 Wouldn't even matter if it was on a different page, it would send you there.
  • 02:33 All right, so now that I have them captioned,
  • 02:35 I have my cross references set up within the document text.
  • 02:39 Now I need a nice list of my finished product and
  • 02:41 that is called an Insert Table of Figures.
  • 02:45 All right, again References ribbon, Captions group, Insert Table of Figures.
  • 02:50 I'm just gonna leave all this alone and hit OK and look what happens.
  • 02:54 An entire tiny table of contents of my figures, so
  • 02:57 it's called a Table of Figures, all right?
  • 02:59 So now when you click on there it all turns gray which means it's a field.
  • 03:04 You can right-click and you can Update Field in case you add more captions later,
  • 03:09 or you can Ctrl+click, Ctrl+click and go right to that picture.
  • 03:14 There it is, the desert picture.
  • 03:16 All right, that is captions,
  • 03:18 which become cross referenced figure names, which become a table of figures.
  • 03:23 Thank you.

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