Hello, I've created a table of contents for a research paper. The research paper is required to use APA formatting. For the most part it works well once I've customized the styling of the headings and the table of contents itself.

However, APA specifies the main body of the paper (ie where the introduction starts) should start out with the title of the paper, not the text "Introduction". The text "Introduction" does not actually exist anywhere on the page where the introduction lives. Therefore, the table of content uses the entire title of the paper instead of just the text "Introduction". I can manually modify the table of contents to fix this but each time I use the "Update Field" option on the table of contents, it reverts to the entire title and must be manually fixed again.

Is there a way to provide some sort of alt text for headings so that the alt text is displayed in the table of contents instead of the heading text itself?

You would do this by adding a hidden TC field at the start of your Introduction text like this
{TC Introduction \l 1}

And your TOC field can be told to build off both outline levels and the TC fields
{TOC \o "1-3" \f \h}

__________________
Andrew Lockton
Chrysalis Design, Melbourne Australia

You would then want the entire title to not be in a style that is picked up by the TOC unless you want that in as well as Introduction.

For more, see TOC Tips and Tricks by Suzanne Barnhill, MVP.

Thank you so much, seems to work nicely! For others needing this functionality, I used this answer as a starting point and found the details about how to actually do this on youtube (read the description if you don't want to watch the video). I'm also on a Mac, so had to adjust the commands further, but the basic concept works.