I work in an office as part of the NHS which has just moved over to Office 2010, and I have been tasked with creating several standardised templates in Word. Most of it has gone well; I've created a template with three custom styles which the TOC recognises and updates properly.



However, my manager asked me to add a fourth level, and now I have problems. Although I have managed to create a fourth custom style to use on headings for the TOC to recognize, when I try and re-create the TOC manually, it doesn't seem to recognize the first style heading. In the manual TOC prompt box (in the window that shows the styles), the first style heading doesn't appear, although the other three do. If I re-create the TOC anyway, I get a mess of text on the page.The first level headings become centered in the page, and the other three headings appear on the right-hand side. They all have page numbers, but although the option is selected, the dotted lines connecting the text to the page number's doesn't appear, and the page numbers aren't right-aligned. Can anyone help?

Is there a reason for not using Word's built-in heading Styles? They're a whole lot easier to work with and can be modified to suit your layout requirements.

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

See Why use Microsoft Word’s built-in heading styles? and How to create a table of contents in Microsoft Word.

This has to do with the TOC layout you selected or dictated through codes if you did it manually. Each level of the TOC has its own style.

You may also want to look at Templates in Microsoft Word.