Tips Tuesday: The Cross-Referencing Feature

Ever been drafting an agreement which makes references to other sections or paragraphs in the agreement, added or removed a section, then realized that all of your paragraph references are now incorrect and you’ve got a big mess on your hands?

Cross-referencing is the solution to this problem. Cross-referencing is a Microsoft Word feature that saves you from this very problem. The catch? Your document must have some sort of headings from the style guide or automatic numbering from which the cross-referencing menu can reference.

Cross-referencing works by inserting a link to the paragraph which you are referencing, allowing it to automatically update as you add or remove paragraphs, which will save you the time and headache of having to manually update at the end of drafting.

This feature is available under the References tab, then nestled under the section of the tab which says “Captions”. When you click on “Cross-Reference” a box will open showing you all of the numbering which is in your document.

To use the cross-referencing feature, place your cursor in the location in your document where you want to insert the reference. Click on “Cross-reference” > click on the paragraph from the list which you want to insert into your document > click “Insert”. You can do multiple references at one time by leaving the cross-referencing box open and navigating to all of the locations in your document which require a reference.

When you are finished editing your document and want to ensure all of the fields updated, you can use CTRL + A to select the entire document or click and drag to select the entire document > then press SHIFT + F9 to update the fields. You can also right click on an individual field and click “Update Field”. Your fields should also automatically update when you print the document.

For more information on cross-referencing, you can check out this article from Microsoft Office: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/create-a-cross-reference-300b208c-e45a-487a-880b-a02767d9774b

– Charlene Scheffelmair (@cscheffy11)