In addition to my own research, I am an academic reference librarian. I'm trying to help a master's-level student with a problem I've never seen in many, many years of doing word processing. Our library has an MS Word template with several styles built in to help students with basic formatting.



This student went crazy with subheadings. Everything a subheading practically. I've suggested that she undoes that because the TOC is six pages long for 15-page paper! However, the paper has a problem that I have not been able to fix no matter how much experimenting I do. There are several subheadings in the paper. The paragraph after the subhead is being treated as a subhead and put into the TOC. I've tried deleting text until the first word of the paragraph is right next to the end of the subhead and pressed enter. Then, I selected the entire paragraph and assigned it "normal" style for text.

Alas, it still shows up in the TOC after I have updated the whole document to fix the TOC. I don't want to undo all the formatting for the paper. It is good work and I don't want to penalize the student for creating a situation I can't fix. The paragraphs after the subheadings also have the subheading style. I can copy and paste the whole paper to plain text but that would create a huge amount of work for the student (or me ) to do. Any suggestions? Thanks.


Ken

This sort of problem is difficult to diagnose without access to the document and the student wouldn't thank you for that. Three issues spring to mind.


1. Are the sub headings terminated with paragraph breaks or line breaks. Click the ¶ button to check.
2. Has the TOC (a field) been properly updated or reinserted after making the changes?
3. Document corruption. Try copying all but the last paragraph break to a new blank document based on the same template.

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Graham Mayor - MS MVP (Word) (2002-2019)
Visit my web site for more programming tips and ready made processes www.gmayor.com

You need to reveal the field code used in the TOC to work out exactly what attributes are being used to populate the TOC.

For instance a field code like this
{TOC \o "1-3"}
tells you that the outline levels are being used to build the TOC and therefore you should check the outline levels of the paragraphs that are going in to the TOC that you don't want.

If your TOC explicitly names the styles, such as...
{TOC \t "Heading 1,1,subhead,2" }
then you edit this list or make sure those styles are not used when you don't want them in the TOC.

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Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

How did you assign the normal style?

Often what appears to be body text is actually a heading that has had direct formatting applied. You can see an example of this in my article Headings that do not show up in the Navigation Pane or in a Table of Contents

If reapplying Normal style to text does not help, perhaps the "Outline level" for the Normal style has been set to something other than "Body Text." You can check this in the Modify Style dialog box for Normal.

Click in a paragraph to which Normal has been applied. Press Ctrl+Shift+S to display the Apply Styles pane. Press the Modify button. In the dialog box, click Format > Paragraph and go to the Indents and Spacing tab. Change the Outline Level to "Body Text" and confirm the choices by clicking OK.

Try updating the TOC.

If it still fails, reveal the TOC field code, delete the \u switch and update the TOC again.

Attached Images

modifyStyleDialogNormalStyle.png (170.1 KB, 11 views)

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Stefan Blom
Microsoft Word MVP

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