Easily creating a table of contents

Now that you've moved to Styles to format your document, creating a Table of Contents in Word 2010 is insanely easy. Let's create a simple Table of Contents, and then we will take a look at some of the options. First, here's our TWO TREES OLIVE OIL EMPLOYEE MANUAL, and there's a blank page here, waiting for us to insert a Table of Contents. I have the Navigation pane displayed here on the left, because the contents of the Navigation pane are actually going to be the same as the Table of Contents in a moment. I am going to go to References > Table of Contents.

There are really two built-in tables of contents. The difference between them is one says CONTENTS, and one says, TABLE OF CONTENTS. I will simply choose the first one, and we have our Table of Contents that quickly, that easily. This Table of Contents was created dynamically, and the page numbers here actually link to the headings. If I hold the Ctrl key down and point to a page number and click, I can actually go to that spot in my document. A user needs to know to do this.

There's no easy way for them to know otherwise. There's no hyperlink that shows it. But you can educate users, and you can know yourself that if you hold Ctrl and Click, you'll actually go to that position in your document. Go back to the beginning of my document. Unlike a Table of Contents, I create manually this Table of Contents, has a way to automatically update, as you can tell when the table is selected, you see Update Table. For example, I'm going to go change one of my headings. We're going to change the heading for The Story Behind Two Trees Extra Virgin Olive Oil.

We are going to call this THE REAL STORY BEHIND TWO TREES EXTRA VIRGIN OLIVE OIL. This is the kind of change we'd routinely make in a document that we're working with. Then I'm going to put a blank page after this, and I am going to simply do that by inserting a blank page in the document. So now my introduction doesn't start until page 7. These are two significant changes, if you've typed this Table of Contents. But by using the Table of Contents feature, this is really easy to fix.

When I click Update Table, there are two choices. One is to simply update the page numbers. Word hangs on to the headings it has already and goes and says, what page will I find these headings on now? The other possibility ,and one I more frequently use, says rescan the document again like you did the first time, replace this Table of Contents with one you generate dynamically again, so that if the name of a section has changed, or I have inserted a heading that I didn't remember, you'll catch it on this go around. So I am going to say OK, and you'll notice here, the real story, and you'll also notice that section 1 starts on page 7.

It couldn't be easier. This Table of Contents is a bit long, though. It covers everything, all the Heading Level 1s, and Heading Level 2s. It's possible that I might want a shorter Table of Contents, perhaps there's an index that I've placed at the back of this document, and all I need here is a short Table of Contents that I reflects only my Heading 1s, rather than other headings. So I'm going to remove this Table of Contents, and let's take a look at some options. Let's go back to References. If we are anywhere in the Table of Contents, we can choose to remove the Table of Contents.

That's References > Table of Contents > Remove Table of Contents, it's gone. And now we are going to choose the Insert Table of Contents command, which will open up the Table of Contents dialog box, and allow us to make some choices. First, Show levels; I really only want level 1 headings. Other choices, I could say I don't want to show page numbers. You might wonder why wouldn't I want to show page numbers? Perhaps what you want is a list of the sections of the document, and you don't necessarily want to create it as a Table of Contents.

Page numbers are automatically right- aligned, but I have the choice to put them over closer to the text, and there's automatically a Tab leader, but I can remove that Tab leader or put a dashed line if I prefer, an underscore line, or no line at all. I am going to keep the default setting here. This is what the document will look like when printed, and actually how it appears on the screen. I also have the choice, if I publish this to the Web, to use hyperlinks rather than page numbers.

This would be a good use of a document, a Word document that I typically would simply open from my Internet and go search the document or browse in the document. By publishing this document as a Web page, what I get is a Table of Contents that's filled with hyperlinks, rather than filled with page numbers. So, Heading 1's only, Show page numbers. Let's say OK, and there is my simple Table of Contents, made to order. If I want to update this Table of Contents, I can right-click and choose Update field.

With the entire Table of Contents selected, I can also choose that Update Table button if I wish. Let's remove this Table of Contents, and once again quickly generate the full Table of Contents from scratch Headings 1, 2 and 3, just to remember how easy that was. Word's Table of Contents generator is a great feature that's powerful and yet extremely easy to use. This is yet another reason to create and structure, through formatting, your documents using styles.