Here is a temporary link to your document with some more changes including not using the List Paragraph style for a heading.
Dropbox - TOC Template -- Latest Version v03.docx - Simplify your life

The Table of Contents, the List of Figures, and the List of Tables are all fields. So are the numbers in the Captions.See my article Dealing with Fields in Microsoft Word which is likely more than you want to know about the subject but just scratches the surface. There are a number of much more in-depth tutorials pinned to this forum.

Fields do not update automatically, quite. A Print Preview will update many fields but not all. There is a link in my article to an explanation of which fields get updated, when. Probably the most sensitive ones I know of are the Pagination Fields which do seem to update immediately. However, the page numbers in a TOC do not update automatically. For that matter, a Table of Contents does not care whether or not there is a page number on the page.

When I have fields in my document (like the numbering in the Captions) that also appears in a Table of Contents / Figures / Tables, I sometimes select all the text in the document and press the F9 key to update fields. With a TOC/TOF, a dialog will usually pop up asking if I just want to update the page numbers. I will tell Word page numbers only on this pass.

Then I will press F9 again, and this time tell Word to update the entire table. If there is any chance that updating my Table of Contents/etc changed pagination of the rest of the document, I will press it a third time, this time again saying page numbers only.


No wonder I couldn't reproduce your result with the List of Tables.


I will take another look at your off-center headings.
The following may help: Number Alignment by Suzanne Barnhill, MVP.