The Blog

Taming the Table of Contents

Many people don’t realize that Word is capable of compiling a Table of Contents (TOC) for your document automatically, if you set things up right.  Here is how to do it, in a nutshell:

  • Structure your document to be organized using heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3…)
  • Put the cursor where you want the TOC to appear
  • From the menu, choose Insert > Index and Tables… (this may be in a different place in different in older versions of Word, but it’s there somewhere!)
  • Choose the Table of Contents tab
  • Pick a format and a number of levels to show (and, optionally, fuss with the other options you see)
  • Click OK

Voila! The TOC appears. The real beauty is that as you continue to edit the document (specifically, as you and, remove, or edit headings), you can come back to the TOC, right-click on it, and choose Update Field, and it will re-scan the document and update the entire table for you. Sweet. :-)

Phil Webster

About Phil Webster

Phil is the founder of BeMused Software.

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