Word 2007 and later it’s under the ‘References’ tab on the ribbon. The basics haven’t changed much for many versions of Word.

Once you’ve got some headings formatted in your document you can make a Table of Contents. TOC’s are also made from Outline Levels a hidden paragraph attribute. It’s a common misunderstanding that Word uses the Heading styles to make the Table of Contents but that’s not strictly true. However, you can assign any paragraph style to a level in the TOC. That’s the easy way and what we’ll use in this article. If you haven’t already, go through your document applying Heading styles to heading and sub-headings. Normally you’ll use the ‘Heading 1’, ‘Heading 2’ etc styles in Word to define the headings that you want to show in the Table of Contents. Word takes the text from paragraphs in nominated styles to make up the TOC. Preparing your documentīefore you make your Table of Contents (aka TOC) you need to setup your document with headings that will make up the TOC.

It’s a good way to see an overview of a long document and ensure that it’s in a logical structure.įinally, it can be a way to jump to parts of the document if you don’t like using the Document Map/Navigation Pane feature in Word. TOC’s can be useful in any long document such as a contract.īeyond the simple Table of Contents there are a lot of extras and tricks.Ĭhoose the words to show in a Word Table of Contentsįour Word tricks to shrink a Table of ContentsĪ table of contents can be there for ‘in house’ use while making the document, and later removed or reduced in the final version. Table of Contents is very easy to do in Word and it’s not just for people who are making books. The look of the dialog boxes and galleries changed with Word 2007 however under those superficial features, the fundamentals are the same. The basic TOC options haven’t changed for a long time. Let’s look at the basic options for making a Table of Contents (TOC) in a Word document.

Word manually format table of contents