Table of Contents - MS Word
Hello! This site was created to compile and store the team's knowledge regarding our main work tool: Microsoft Word. This text processor offers more possibilities than meets the eye, and has its own fair share of issues as well. Hopefully, the information found here can be used to help all of us when we're stuck on our day to day business.
A disappearing or incorreclty updated table of contents is one of the most common issues in our documentation. Normally, this can be solved by creating a new Table of Contents from scratch. Here, you will find the necessary information to carry this procedure out.
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In the MS Word Ribbon, select the References tab, then, click on the Table of Contents option.
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Once there, select the Custom Table of Contents option. This will open a configuration screen.
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In this menu, click on Options. This new screen will allow you to configure the size and appearance of the styles that are used by MS Word to build the table of contents.
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The styles in this screen must be configured according to the desired appearance of the items in the table of contents. A value between 1 and 4 can be configured. 1 must be assigned to the largest style in the Table, normally, this would be Heading Mega or Heading 1, while 2 and 3 must be used for the next following styles in the Table of contents. 4 is reserved for Enf_Alca_Aud, since this value gives that style a special appearance. In the following table, we can see some common configurations that can be used as reference
| Value | Configuration 1 | Configuration 2 |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heading Mega | Heading 1 |
| 2 | Heading 1 | Heading 2 |
| 3 | Heading 2 | Heading 3 |
| 4 | Enf_Alca_Aud | Enf_Alca_Aud |
- Select OK in both menus to create the table of contents. For the time being, it should look a bit like this:
However, there is one more step to configure the table of contents correctly, we want to remove the page number in the largest heading in the table. Select the whole table either by holding the left click button or by using the Shift key and then press the Shift and F9 keys smultaniously. This will open up a line of code that can be used to configure the table of contents in a deeper level. The line should look like to this:
{TOC \h \z \t "Heading 1;2;Heading 2;3;Text1;2;TOC13;1;Enf_Alca_Aud;4;Heading Mega;1;TITLE1;1;Super_Heading;1"}
- Before the closing bracket, enter the following characters: `\n"1-1"` This will remove the numbers from the styles that have been assigned to be the largest in the table of contents. The line of code should look like this now:
{TOC \h \z \t "Heading 1;2;Heading 2;3;Text1;2;TOC13;1;Enf_Alca_Aud;4;Heading Mega;1;TITLE1;1;Super_Heading;1" \n"1-1}
Right click on the line of code and select Update Field. Once the table is updated to reflect its new configuration, the page number in the largest heading should have disappeared:
Now, the table of contents should be configured correctly. If by any chance, the table gets corrupted and stops working as it should, just follow the steps outlined in this guide. Good luck!