Change default style of a caption in Word?

Question

When inserting a figure or table, you can add a caption. It has some default styling that you can edit in the Quick Styles pane. By default in Word 2013 this is a 9pt italic font. Unfortunately, this makes the caption and the text itself italic, e.g. > *Table 1 Income breakdown*. My academic guidelines, however, indicate that captions should not be in italics, with exception of the enumeration of the figure or table. Some punctuation is necessary as well, e.g. > *Table 1*. Income breakdown.Is there any way this can be achieved in an automated manner?

Answer 1

So far, Microsoft doesn't provide a way to have different formats for the label in a caption and the caption itself. However, there is a macro that achieves this beautifully. I've used it in a file with hundreds of captions. I did not create this macro, but found it in a forum and have provided the link here:

https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/msoffice/forum/msoffice_word-mso_other/is-there-a-way-to-have-caption-label-number-in/633ed410-8fb6-4108-bca0-112efd5ac587

It was written by someone with the username hongcc1.

Here is the code, which you can also find at the link above. Just copy and paste it into the Visual Editor and then run the macro called CaptionBold.

Sub CaptionBold()

Application.ScreenUpdating = False

With ActiveDocument.Range

With .Find

.ClearFormatting

.Text = “”

.Style = “Caption”

.Replacement.Text = “”

.Forward = True

.Wrap = wdFindStop

.Format = True

.MatchCase = False

.MatchWholeWord = False

.MatchWildcards = False

.MatchSoundsLike = False

.MatchAllWordForms = False

.Execute

End With

Do While .Find.Found

With .Paragraphs.Last.Range.Duplicate

.End = .Start + Len(Split(.Text, ” “)(0)) + 1

.MoveEndUntil ” “, wdForward

.Style = “Strong”

End With

.Collapse wdCollapseEnd

.Find.Execute

Loop

End With

Application.ScreenUpdating = True

End Sub