That's just it though. I tried what I thought was logical but it's not working the way I want. Here's exactly what I did:
Hit the down arrow to the far right of the styles tab on the home page and created 3 new styles. 2 are pretty fancy; the font size of the first style 24, the second style uses a font size of 18 and the third styles uses a font size of 16.



I then go to the references tab, select table of contents, custom table of contents, and choose modify, modify again, and for TOC1 I set the "style based on" to GE1, which is the 24 point font. TOC2, the 18 point font and TOC3 the 16 point font.

The table shows an orange 24 point font, then the blue 18 point font, then green 16 point font. I don't want that. I want a table of contents that uses nothing but Calibri, font size 11 in black. Besides looking tacky, the large font sizes cause the table to be 22 pages, not 5.

When you base a style B on another style A, then settings in B that haven't been explicitly set will adjust to those of A. This is by design. I'm not what yo are trying to accomplish. If you want to make sure that text of a certain style is inluded in the TOC, change its outline level from "Body text" to the value of your chioce.

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

Microsoft 365 apps for business
Windows 11 Professional