Microsoft® Word 2007 Bible

Chapter 33. Tables of Contents

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Automatic tables of contents

• Tables of contents using styles and outline levels

• Manual tables of contents

• TOC styles

• Understanding the TOC field code

In this chapter, we look at what has become the master control for online documents, and the chief selling point for many books—the table of contents. For online documents, a table of contents provides hyperlinks into the rest of the document. See an interesting heading? Click on it to see if it measures up. For published books, smart readers thumb through the table of contents to see what the book covers. Smarter readers, however, check the index, to see if crucial but arcane tidbits are covered. We'll look at indexes in Chapter 38. In addition to being the inside cover by which many a book is judged, tables of contents are de rigueur for many formal reports, as well as a sign of professionalism.

Automatic Tables of Contents

A table of contents is a heading-oriented list of what's in a document, and on what page each heading (or other table of contents entry) occurs. If you use Word's built-in heading styles religiously (after all, this is a Bible), you might never have to worry about some of the finer points of Word's Table of Contents commands. If, on the other hand, you need additional flexibility, you can use other styles, as well as direct entries, to create a table of contents.

Heading Styles

By far, the easiest way to create a table of contents is to use Word's built-in Heading 1 through ...