When it comes to adding important-looking items into your documents, forget the Insert tab. The place to go is the References tab.

References Tab (click for larger version)

There are six areas on the Reference tab worthy of ridicule. They all help you create lists of things stuffed into your document.

Table of Contents. This area helps you build a table of contents. I mean, duh. The key is to use the heading styles in Word, or similar styles that use the Paragraph Level format. That way the Table of Contents can be generated automatically, including all the page references.

Footnotes. I discussed this item in Wednesday’s blog post here.

Citations & Bibliography. The start of the weirdo items on the References tab deals with documents that reference other works, such as your typical doctoral thesis, which is often nothing more than a collection of quotes of works by others.

You use the Insert Citation>Add New Source command to build the citation, which is the name of a published work, the author, year, publisher, and other nonsense. Then you use the Insert Citation button to quickly add a reference to a work inside your document. The Bibliography button is used to create the bibliography list at the end of the document.

Captions. You use the Captions area if you need to create a figure summary or captions list in your document. So instead of manually adding a caption to a figure, you click the Insert Caption button when the picture is selected. For that purpose alone, the command is worthy.

What makes the Captions area truly worth is when you need a list of Figures in your document. The Insert Table of Figures button is what makes that happen.

Index. The Index button helps you build an index for a document. It’s actually pretty easy to use once you figure it out. I talk about it in my Word For Dummies book.

Table of Authorities. Perhaps the weirdest option, the Table of Authorities is used when creating a document that cites other documents, such as laws, rules, or recipes. Again, the purpose here is that you can place the references in your document using the Mark Citation button, and then use the wee li’l Insert Table of Authorities button to slap the entire thing down into your document.

Confession time: I’ve use Table of Contents, Footnotes, and Index in documents I’ve written. The other groups I’ve used only just to see how they work. That’s probably because I don’t have to create the complex and boring documents that require such things.