Hi all,

I'm trying to do a table of contents setup & I'm not understanding the instructions when I searched in the help area of Word.

At one point I got a TOC set up, but it ended up copying a few paragraphs & not just the heading which is what it should do.

I also don't know how to do these styles which I'm understanding is the first step, correct? I'm not sure, do I need the styles? Do they just make the headings larger, or do they do fancy designs of the headings?



Thank you for any help you can give me.


Michelle

The built-in headings will be included in the TOC by default; therefore it is convenient for you to make use of them. You can modify their formatting if you want to. The basics on TOC creation is explained in the article at http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/numb...fcontents.html.

To prevent other paragraphs from being added into the TOC, deleting the \u switch from the TOC field code is the easiest way. Take a look at http://word.mvps.org/faqs/general/DocumentMap.htm.

__________________
Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional

Hello. Indeed, you do need to begin to understand styles to understand what's going wrong with your TOC, and I would urge you to read up on them from whatever tutorial or library book source you may choose.

Meanwhile, your problem is common and not very serious. Very briefly, automated TOCs work by picking up designated styles from teh text. For instance, the Heading 1 style is picked up by the Level 1 TOC style when the TOC automation routine scans the docuemtn looking for headings.

A style is simply a group of characteristics, such as font, font size, line spacing, space above and below paragraphs, etc. Direct formatting, as when making a word bold, is not the same as an actual style.

In any case, the reason you are picking up whole paragraphs of text in your TOC, is becuase those paragraphs have been erroneously styled with a heading style, which is being picked up by the TOC scan. All you need to do to remedy this, is to restyle those paragraphs as whatever they should be.

There's more to this, is may be clear, but that should get you started.

Best,
Ulodesk

Hi guys,

Sorry for the delay.

I've been busy.

I tried to do what you guys said & then got side tracked & am working on it right now, but I had to redo all the page numbers as they aren't coming out right.

When I highlight the paragraphs, they say font 14 pt or 16 pt, they DON'T say heading 1, so that clearly isn't the reason it's doing that.

I had to go in manually & delete all the parags. from the TOC b/c even after I made every headline a heading in the styles, it still screwed up.

It grabbed the headings I wanted so that's a good thing & what's also confusing is that when I went to do a heading 2, it italicized it in the doc when you said it's not supposed to make physical changes.

I ended up leaving it like that b/c I don't have time to figure out what the problems are.

Thanks for the help you gave me.

Take care


Michelle

Hi Michelle,

Every piece of text in Word has at least one Style attribute. This is a paragraph Style. A paragraph Style defines the basic look of a paragraph in terms of justification, indenting, typeface, point size, and so on. You can also use chaacter Styles for changing the attributes of various parts of a paragraph. Even though a paragraph will always have a paragraph Style, the formatting is gives can be overridden manually, changing the paragraph to look quite different from what its Style definition says it should look like. Inexperienced Word users often make this mistake.

Your reference to 'font 14 pt or 16 pt' is a reference to font attributes, not to the Style definition. If you have full the 'Formatting' toolbar displayed, the left-most panel tells you the Style definition for wherever the insertion point is located. Next to that is the typeface, then the point size. The Style definition is what you need to work with for the Table of Contents.

By default, when you insert a Table of Contents field in Word, it picks up any paragraph with the Style definitions for the paragraph Styles named Heading1, Heading2 and Heading3. Now, if you're getting paragraphs that don't look like headings, that'll be because someone has take a paragraph with one of the heading Styles applied and over-ridden its formatting to make it look like something else. A simple and effective solution for this is to delete the preceding paragraph's paragraph break (if it's not in a heading Style), then immediately press Enter. You can also achieve the same result by copying the paragraph break from another paragraph that's not in a heading Style, and pasting that immediately before the paragraph break for the problem paragraph. You can then delete the problem paragraph break.

When you're done, goto the Table of Contents, press F9 to update it (choose 'entire table') and the problem entries should disappear.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]