Creating Table of Contents in Microsoft Word

As mentioned in last week's post, Styles allow you to create Table of Contents in your word processor. In this post, I will provide steps how to create the table of contents in Microsoft Word.

Assuming you used Styles in your text, click the Reference tab in the ribbon, and click the drop-down arrow of Table of Contents, as shown here:

You will be shown various built-in TOC templates. I recommend that you create your own. To do so, click "Insert Table of Contents" located at the bottom of the drop-down menu. In Word 2013, it might show "Custom Table of Contents" instead.

A window will appear, with the Table of Contents tab selected. Here you can customize the TOC if it will have a tab leader (the fill between the TOC item and the page number), how it will look like, how many levels, etc.

By default, it will use Heading 1 for level 1 of the TOC outline, Heading 2 for level 2, and so on and so forth. When you click Options button, you will be provided more options what Styles to use, as shown below:

After choosing the Styles and the TOC level, click OK here and OK on the original window. It should create your TOC in a flash.

I will discuss how to create a Table of Contents in LibreOffice or OpenOffice.Org Writer next week. If you have any question, please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks for reading!