HOW TO CREATE A WORD 2007 TABLE OF CONTENTS
by Neil Randall

When your Word documents approach novel—or even novella—length, it may be time to give readers a table of contents. 

Sometimes the ideas for my Solutions pieces come from readers; other times they’re the result of problems I’ve encountered and managed to solve on my own. There are also occasions when I decide a solution is needed simply because people around me keep asking for help on a certain point. I figure if a bunch of people I know are uncertain, it’s a good bet others some readers are as well. This solution, creating a table of contents (TOC) in Word, is a request that never seems to go away.

As with many things in Microsoft Word 2007, such as indexing, the Table of Contents feature comes almost unchanged out of earlier versions of the software. One thing, though, that makes Word 2007’s TOC feature more usable than earlier versions is the inclusion of the Styles gallery—that big thing that takes up the right half of the Home ribbon.

The trick with Word TOCs is recognizing that they rely (for the most part) on styles. A basic TOC is essentially nothing more than Word grabbing text that has been assigned a specific style and placing it in a hierarchically arranged list. You tell Word which style you want to make up each step on the hierarchy, and Word formats it for you as a TOC. As you might expect, you can modify this arrangement (and we’ll get to that), but a quick-and-dirty TOC is pretty easy to create.

First, have a look at the following organization—it’s the standard one for TOCs.

TOC Level One
  TOC Level Two
    TOC Level Three

TOC Level One
  TOC Level Two
    TOC Level Three

And so on. The hierarchy here is, obviously, that Level One reflects the main TOC headings, Level Two reflects secondary TOC headings, and Level Three reflects tertiary TOC headings. Many TOCs stop at only two levels, of course, but more are possible.

To create a TOC in Word, first determine which textual elements (we’ll call them “TOC headings” here) you want to appear in it. Often these are the same as the titles and subtitles in your document. Then assign a unique style to all instances of each TOC level. For example, assign one particular style to all the main TOC headings and another to all the secondary TOC headings. Make sure these styles aren’t used for anything else in the document (or else Word will think it’s part of the TOC). To assign a style to a text element, simply highlight the text and click, in the Style gallery, the style you want it to have.

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.
 
Once 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.
 
The 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.
 
Note 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.
 
While 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.

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