To clarify:
If you select text and apply a
linked style to it, you get a character style without any outline level included. That is, the paragraph style is not changed. The character formatting is changed but not the paragraph formatting. I really dislike this and turn this "feature" off.
It helps to display the non-printing paragraph marks.
Showing non-printing formatting marks in Microsoft Word
If, rather than selecting text, you simply click inside a paragraph and apply a style, the entire paragraph receives that style. In the case of heading styles, that means an outline level is applied that is picked up by the TOC field.
It is possible to have two or more pieces of text that Word considers to be a paragraph inside of a single logical paragraph (a run-in-head). That is, it reads and prints as a single paragraph but Word sees more than one for things like the Table of Contents. The tool to do this is called a
Style Separator.
If you are going to be using Word for your work, I suggest spending a bit of time learning it. It is, unfortunately, not that intuitive. It is logical. If you learn the way Word works, it makes sense even though it may not be the way you would expect without that underlying knowledge.
Basic Concepts of Microsoft Word - from Shauna Kelly
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