Thursday, August 6, 2015

Get your Table of Authorities to sort things right


When gathering all the statutory codes and other enumerated authorities marked for a table of authorities, Microsoft Word sorts these character by character. That means, for instance, that 42 U.S.C. § 1983 is listed before 42 U.S.C. § 2. The computer sorts all the 1s in that first numerical group together first, then all the 2s, and so on. Only after it reaches the end of the list does it move on to the next digit (e.g., the 9 in 1983). Fortunately, there’s an easy fix to this. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to implement with Microsoft Word’s built-in features. But a very simple macro will take care of that.