However, would still like the names of the sections to appear in the TOC. The document will be going in a binder with physical labeled section dividers, so I have no need for the individual section pages that are currently in the document, and don’t want them to be included in the pagination count either. It doesn’t appear that the author using a “Heading 1” style to set up the section titles in the document, and the TOC appears to be pulling the formatting (bolded) for the sections from the section page formatting (regular text), which she appeared to overwrite manually for those pages.
The TOC appears to be set up as a manual TOC with two levels displayed. I have a Word document, created by someone else, which has individual pages that divide the document into sections. I’m hoping someone can help me with what I’m trying to do. Instead of modifying the properties of the style, I stumbled across a very easy way to do this: I already created a copy of my “Heading 1” style in the past which should have excluded it from the TOC but somehow the style was modified along the way. In the following, simple example the sections “document properties”, “document history” and “index” should not be included in the TOC: Messy heading styles also make navigating in your document via the Navigation Pane (which I personally use very, very often!) more difficult.
Pro tip: Having consistency in your heading styles is crucial when working in large documents. Often, when you open a document created by someone else, or if you copy over portions of other documents, your table of contents can get cluttered with headings you don’t necessarily want in your TOC. Maybe you have some preliminary chapters, such as a management summary, that shouldn’t be in the TOC or the heading styles are basically just a mess. Today, I came across a very effective tip when dealing with Word. In our line of work, we often have to create monster Word documents with numerous headings, styles, tables, figures, captions, footnotes, references, table of contents, and so on. Cleaning up the Table of Contents (TOC) in Microsoft WordĪs a consultant and architect, I consider myself a pretty heavy Microsoft Word user. This is my first blog post in that category which I have dubbed Tips & Tricks and it focuses on cleaning up the Table of Contents in Microsoft Word. Call it a journal or a sort of external memory. Now I can easily navigate my document, move things around and also add a table of contents.In my motivation for starting my blog at, I explained one of the purposes of my blog was to simply write down stuff I was going to forget for sure. Now you can see that all of my headings are visible in the Navigation pane.
The reason why I do this is because I want to keep the formatting that I have in my document. I will go to the “Heading 1” style and I will right click and choose “Update Heading 1 to Match Selection”. In order to work effectively with long documents, you need to apply a structure in Word by adding style headings. To do that, I will mark the first heading in my document, and then I will choose “Select” – “Select text with similar formatting”, this way all of my headings in the document will be marked.
Learn how to add Headings to a document using Microsoft Word 2010
The full video: “ Survive working on long documents” shows you how to perform the steps in a slower, more user-friendly fashion.Ĭontact us to learn more about our full, ad-free video library or sign up for the full course, “ Professional documents using Microsoft Word 2010” on Udemy. Please note that this is a shortened, fast-speed video with the objective to give you a glimpse of ways in which you can improve your business productivity.