When your Word documents approach novel—or even novella—length, it may be time to give readers a table of contents.
By default, Word assumes you want to use the “Heading” styles for your TOC entries: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so forth. (The first two are visible on the Styles gallery, as long as you haven’t modified it.) You may use whatever styles you want, however, including any you create yourself. But you might want to stick with the defaults, at least while you experiment with TOC creation: Word’s automatic TOC generator uses these by default.
Word Table of Content Automated OptionsOnce you’ve assigned styles to the headings that will be listed on your TOC, place the cursor where you want the TOC to appear in your document (the very top or right after a title page, typically), and click References on the menu bar. Next, click the Table of Contents button at the far left of the References ribbon. The top two options in the resulting drop-down menu give you nearly identical automatic TOC options (the only difference being the title). A third option, the manual TOC, simply generates a set of placeholder text; you then change the headings and the page numbers yourself. It’s useful only in helping a bit with formatting.
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Word Table of Content Dialog BoxThe important point to note here is that the automatic TOC options use standard Styles as the basis for TOC headings: Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on. To assign other styles as TOC headings, first create those styles, and then choose Insert Table of Contents from the Table of Contents drop-down menu. After adjusting any items on this dialog you want to change (Formats gives some basic layout themes, for example), click the Options button.
Most of the Table of Contents Options dialog consists of the Styles section. Here you choose which styles represent which elements of the TOC. By default (and not shown in the graphic here), Heading 1 is given TOC level 1, Heading 2 is given TOC level 2, and so on. In the graphic, TOC level 1 has been assigned to the style called Title, and level 2 to the style called Subtitle. To delete the level number from existing styles, highlight the number in the field and press the Delete key. When you’ve made your choices, click OK and Word will generate the TOC at the current cursor location.
Word Table of Content Dialog 2Note the option in the dialog box to use hyperlinks instead of page numbers. It’s selected by default and will, as you might guess, link the text in the TOC to the places in the document where the headings indicated appear; anyone reading your document in Word rather than on a printout can simply Ctrl-click on a hyperlink to be taken to the relevant page.
Word Table of Content Dialog 3While the TOC’s generation depends on your document’s styles, the formatting of the TOC itself (that is, how it looks in your document) does not. To adjust the TOC format, click the Modify button from the main TOC dialog. In the resulting Style dialog, select the TOC level you want to change (TOC 1 is heading level 1, and so on) and click Modify. This reveals Word’s standard Modify Style dialog, where you specify precisely what you want each TOC level heading to look like.
