Baffled About a TOC?

Creating an automatic Table of Contents (TOC) in a Word document often seems to baffle people.  Microsoft had the same impression so in the latest releases of their best selling Office product, version 2010 on the PC and version 2011 on the Mac they’ve provided some pre-formatted TOC solutions.  However, these generic TOC inserts aren’t really appropriate for the professional document developer who needs a more sophisticated level of TOC control, style, and formatting.

To understand how to properly create a custom TOC is to first understand that it is simply an outline of the document.  And an outline, as we all learned in school, is based on a hierarchy of related topics and subtopics that are formatted with Roman-numerals, followed by upper case letters, followed by numbers, then lower case letters etc. and all properly indented.  To Microsoft Word, an outline is an organized list of Heading Styles whose position in the hierarchy is defined by levels, from 1 to 9, with level 1 being the highest. 

To properly create a TOC the first rule to follow is only use the Heading 1 – 9 styles in your document where they should be.  Heading 1 – 9 are titles, meant for creating outlines, and reference lists such as a TOC.  In a professional document, Heading Styles should not be used as body text for multiple lines of text in paragraphs.  Maybe in the 5th grade it was okay to outline a book report using paragraphs of text, but by the 8th grade we all should have learned to do it correctly.

With all Heading Styles in the document now appropriately set; insert a page break where the TOC is to appear. Type a title for this page, “Table of Contents” or something else. Unless you want the title of the TOC page to appear in the TOC itself, I don’t recommend giving this page title a Heading 1 style, which to me would seem redundant.

Depending on your version of Word, you’ll now need to navigate to the Table of Contents dialog box.  If you’re using Word 2010 or 2007 the TOC function is under the Reference tab on the ribbon and in the Table of Contents pull down menu select “Insert Table of Contents.” If you’re using Word 2003 or earlier or using one of the Office versions for the Mac go to the Word Menu, choose Insert then select the item labeled Index and Tables from the menu and then select the Table of Contents tab. 

In this dialog box you’ll see the default number of Heading levels that Word will automatically put into your TOC, the default is three, Heading 1, 2, and 3.  You can change this by selecting the number of levels you want in the Show Levels box.  You’ll also see on this dialog different formats you can insert. And finally, take a look what’s under the Options button.  Here you can further refine what titles you want listed in your TOC by matching other style names to outline levels. For example, let’s say you had an Appendix on you document, with a unique style name.  By indicating that this unique Appendix Style Name is a number 1 outline level, it will appear properly in your custom TOC.

Once everything is set to your liking click OK and your automatic TOC is inserted. The TOC will refresh automatically every time you open the document and if you want to refresh it while editing just press F9.

By following the cardinal rule of professional document formatting that Heading Styles are reserved for true Headings and by practicing with the Table of Contents dialog box, creating a custom TOC won’t be baffling anymore.