So Carol has sent in a request asking for some help with Table of Contents, in particular,
adding items to an existing Table of Contents or changing the level of stuff in the Table
of Contents.
Now Carol, this video is for you, but if you're not Carol, but you're in the same situation
as Carol, this is also for you.
Stay tuned.
Now the thing is with Table of content is they're
actually very easy to set up and if you've set up your document correctly, then the process
of doing Table of Contents is quite simple.
Unfortunately, a lot of people over-complicate and over-think things and built a lot of stuff
manually, which then makes the process of building Table of Contents
really hard.
So let me show you the correct process from the beginning and hopefully this will fill
in some gaps and clear up some of the fog for you.
To build a proper Table of Contents that updates automatically, you need to use the styles
in your setup.
So the four styles I'm going to be using today at the NORMAL style, the HEADING 1, the HEADING
2 and the HEADING 3 which will come into play a bit later on.
I've got a sample document set up here.
So this is just a simple heading that say's Table of Contents, and beneath that I'm going
to insert the Table of Contents using the tool.
Now all this text that you see here, at the moment is using the Normal style, so there's
no special styling attached to it at the moment.
We have a top level headed here that has a subheading and three sub sub headings.
Beneath that we have a second top level heading and that also has a sub heading and a sub
sub heading.
So basically we've got here is three levels of stuff happening.
Let's return to the top.
Now first up I'm just going to take the Table of Contents text and just increase the size
of it, centre it on the page.
That's just normal text that's just a heading.
Let me come down to our first top level heading and I'm going to apply the Heading 1 style
to this.
Now Heading 1, Heading 2 and Heading 3 all use what's called a paragraph style.
And that means that rather than having to select the whole bit of text, which is what
a lot of people do, all you actually have to do is to click somewhere in the text and
because it's a paragraph style, it applies to every bit of text in that paragraph.
So here I click Heading 1, and that's the top level heading style.
I'll do the same for the subheading here and apply the Heading 2 style.
The sub sub heading is a Heading 3.
The other two sub sub headings are also Heading 3.
And then we come to the second top level heading, which is Heading 1.
The next subheading is level 2 and the sub sub heading, that's Heading 3.
So you've now applied either the Heading 1, 2 or 3 styles to all of the headings throughout
the document.
So I'm just leaving some ordinary text in between all these headings just to demonstrate
that these headings can be anywhere in the document.
They are what will be picked up to build the Table of Contents.
And there's one attribute, one property that I need to make you aware of with all these
headings styles.
Now first up, when we started, we only had Heading 1 and Heading 2 at the top here.
As soon as you style something with Heading 2, Heading 3 then becomes available.
As soon as you style something with Heading 3, Heading 4 becomes available and so on.
What you can't do is just have a document that contains Heading 1's and Heading 3's
with no Heading 2's because Heading 3 only becomes available once you have a Heading
2 to put it underneath.
The second thing is if I right click Heading 1 here and choose Modify this takes you to
this dialogue which has all the attributes, all the properties of this particular style,
so this is how Heading 1 looks.
Now, the bit in the middle here, these are the most common things that you tend to change
with a style, so things to do with the font, things to do with your paragraph.
You can also come down to the Format button and it gives you nine categories of stuff
that you can change and set for your style.
Now I've actually got a separate video that does a deep dive on all this stuff and I'll
put the link to this in the show notes beneath this video.
The main point I want to make here though is this property here called AUTOMATICALLY
UPDATE, has a tick box which is currently unticked, which means it's not set on.
So if I just cancel out for a second, if I then make a simple change to this first top
level heading, maybe I'll change the color here.
You'll notice the first top level heading has changed color, but the second one remains
how it was and that's because the AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE is currently switched off, which means
you can make one off changes like this.
Realistically, probably what you want to do here is to have the AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE set
on so that if you make a change to one of the top level headings, they all change.
That way, they remain consistent throughout your document.
You go to Heading 1, you right click and Modify.
You make sure that AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE is set on and click OK.
Let's make another change to this, maybe make it green and this time you can see the first
and second top level headings are green.
So you make a change to one and all of them that are styled with that style change automatically.
So the reason I mentioned that is because later on when we style our Table of Contents,
it's actually the other way around.
The AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE is set on as the default.
Now another common thing you tend to do when you've got lots of levels of stuff happening
is to number it.
So your top level stuff will have ONE and then the first top level heading and then
TWO and then a second top level heading and so on.
And then for the second level down, by the subheading here that tends to be numbered
as 1.1, and then the sub headings underneath will have 1.1.1, 1.1.2, 1.1.3 and it tends
to go down in that sort of fashion.
Now again, I've got another video which does a deep dive on how to set up multi-level numbering
from scratch where it gives you full control over how things are styled, how things are
numbered, where stuff is positioned and all that kind of stuff.
Again, I'll put the link for that in the show notes beneath this video.
But to keep things simple here, if you click any one of these styled headings, doesn't
matter whethe it's Heading 1, Heading 2 or Heading 3, go to your multi-level numbering
icon here and there's one of the preset options here which has the 1, 1.1, 1.1.1 style numbering
with the heading styles listed underneath.
And that means that the heading styles get linked to each level of that numbering.
So with one click we can actually number things automatically all the way through.
And as you can see it's all correct.
And as we make changes later on, the numbering will update itself.
So that's a beautiful thing.
OK, let's return to the main focus of this video, which is to build the Table of Contents
from this content.
So I'm going to go to the top here, just position my cursor.
Now the Table of Contents is on the References tab, on the left-hand
side, Table of Contents.
You've got two preset or built in options which you can choose if you want to and with
one click you have your Table of Contents and it'll be dynamic, which means if your
content then changes in any way, the Table of Contents
can update to stay in line with those.
However, I want to show you some of the other options that are available, some of the settings
you can change so that you can customise this in any way you like.
So down the bottom you have a Custom Table of Contents.
Now I tend to work from the bottom upwards.
First of all, it says SHOW LEVELS and it says three.
Now with our current setup, we actually do have three levels of headings happening, so
three is perfect, but if you, let's say, only Heading 1's and Heading 2's, you might want
to reduce this down to two.
The next thing is, where it says FROM TEMPLATE, that's talking about this style here.
So the way things look.
And as you choose each of these down the bottom here, each option shows something different
and displays things in different ways.
So you can go through and kind of find one you like the look of and use that as a starting
point.
As we move up, we have what's called a TAB LEADER.
Now the Tab Leader is the thing that connects the item with the page number.
In this case, that's a dot but you also have the choice of dashes, underscores or nothing
at all, you can switch it off.
As we move up, the next thing says RIGHT ALIGN YOUR PAGE NUMBERS.
In my opinion, that always looks best if you have that set on.
So have your items on the left hand side and the page numbers all lined up on the right.
If you uncheck it, it actually puts the page numbers right next to your item, which again,
in my opinion, doesn't look too good.
And then the final thing here, it says SHOW PAGE NUMBERS.
Now I mean, DUR, it's a Table of Contents.
What's the point of a Table of Contents without page numbers.
I have no idea.
I don't even know why that's an option, but make sure it's on, make sure your page numbers
are displayed.
That's the whole point of the Table of Contents .
All of these formats with the exception of FROM TEMPLATE, you'll notice the MODIFY button
over here is greyed out.
If you choose From Template, the Modify button is active.
Now, in the same way that we modify the styles of the Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 down
here, you can also modify the styles of the first Table of Contents level, the second
Table of Contents level and the third Table of Contents
level.
In other words, the way that the Table of Contents looks when it's actually created
in just a minute.
By clicking Modify here, it gives you all the Table of Contents
levels.
Lets say we choose the top level, level one, and click Modify.
What you see here is the way that the top level Table of Contents item is going to display
as, and any sort of changes you want to make in terms of font size, font colors, indentations,
all that kind of stuff, again all these nine categories down here you can set things for.
So you can change all that here, but the main thing I want to bring your attention to again
is this option called AUTOMATICALLY UPDATE and you'll see it's ticked by default and
that means that once your Table of Contents
is built, any changes you make to one of the items will change all of the items of that
same level.
So a top level item, you change it, it will change the look of all the top level items
in your Table of Contents
. Now in a minute I'll demonstrate that once the Table of Contents is built.
Now back on this dialog, the other option you have down here is the OPTIONS button.
By default, it links to the Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3.
In other words, the Table of Contents
feature will scan through the document and whenever it come across something that's styled
with Heading 1, 2 or 3, it'll use that text and insert it into the Table of Contents
as an item and it will obviously link to the appropriate page number.
Occasionally, not very often, you may want to link to one of your own custom styles.
So maybe instead of linking into Heading 3, you can remove the three from there which
removes the tick from over here, which means Heading 3 is no longer linked, and you can
come down to whichever style you want to link it to instead, so let's imagine that TITLE
is your custom style, you could put number three down there.
So as long as you've got one, two and three against something, the Table of Contents
then knows what to look for in order to pick up the right stuff at the Table of Contents.
Now for this example I'm going to cancel that.
Just leave it as Heading 1, 2 and 3, that's fine.
But these are the things you can change.
Let's click OK.
this character.
Now, here is your Table of Contents that's ben built from this content down here.
If you click on the Table of Contents
, you'll see how it's got a gray background.
Anything you see in word with a gray shading behind it means that Word controls it.
In other words, you don't have to manually manipulate the page numbers or any of the
content you seen a Table of Contents.
It's updated dynamically.
So as an example, if I come down to here and I put the cursor at the beginning of the second
top level heading and press CTRL ENTER, which is a shortcut to insert a page break.
Return to the top of the document.
Now, at the moment the Table of Contents
is still showing everything on page one, but if I click on it, get the gray shading and
either press F9 or you can also right click and UPDATE FIELD.
It will ask YOU how you want to update it.
Now, if the content hasn't changed, but you've just put stuff onto different pages, you can
just choose UPDATE PAGE NUMBERS ONLY.
But if you've modified your document, you've added new stuff in, you deleted sections,
you've changed stuff around and rearranged them, you probably want to choose UPDATE ENTIRE
TABLE.
That way it does a fresh scan of your document and rebuilds the Table of Contents
from scratch.
So let's choose that one.
And if you want to play it safe, just choose the second one every time you update and then
click OK.
And you can see that the page numbers for the second top level heading and all the subsequent
subheadings have changed to page two.
Now in terms of the positioning and stuff like that, based on the fact that the TOC
1, 2 and 3 styles are all set to Automatically Update, that means that any changes I make
will apply to all the other things that are styled in the same way.
So let's go to this first subheading.
This is level two.
Now looking at the ruler here (and if you don't have the ruler to displayed, just go
to View and make sure that Ruler is ticked), so if I grab this little rectangle here, being
careful to avoid the triangles, when I move this across, this is changing the indent of
the numbers from the margin, so you can see that the numbers now are in line with the
sub sub headings.
And if I also wanted to put the text of the subheading in line with the text of the sub
sub heading I can move the left Tab Marker at the top here, which is indicated with this
little 'L' and if I grab that and drag that across, that's changing the indent of the
text itself.
So what I've done is I've put that on, just past the two mark there.
To bring it perfectly in line I'm going to also take the sub sub heading and just move
that marker back to the same position.
It's slightly offset at the moment, but by doing that you can see they are now perfectly
in line.
So all those kind of little changes you can do here.
So let's say I select the entire text of the first top level heading.
Let's increase the font size a little bit, let's maybe make it bold and let's maybe change
the font color.
So whatever you decide to do, you make the change to one and it changes every time it
comes across it.
Let's say you want to add a bit more of a gap between the first top level heading and
the subheadings.
You can go to your paragraph settings here, it's currently set to have a space of five
points after, maybe you increase that to 12 points after.
That's a big gap, but when you click OK, see how it's added more of a gap underneath the
major headings.
Now sticking with changing levels, let's go back to the main document there, maybe make
this sub sub heading a subheading so I'm just going to change the text there and also to
promote it, I'm going to press SHIFT and TAB.
Now Tab DEMOTES it down a level.
You can see it changing here.
But SHIFT and TAB is a little shortcut key to PROMOTE it up a level.
When I do that it becomes 1.2 (it was previously 1.1.1) because this is now a subheading.
This is now the sub sub heading, so it's gone 1.2.1 where that was briefly 1.1.2.
So all the numbering stays in line as you want it to.
Let's reflect that change back on the Table of Contents, I'm going to right-click on the
Table of Contents and UPDATE FIELD, just update the entire table and click OK, and you can
see that the change here has taken effect.
So that's how you build a dynamic Table of Contents
, so whatever you do to your document, as long as you stick with Heading 1, 2 and 3,
that's linked to the Table of Contents that you built at the top and anytime you want
to update the Table of Contents
, you can either click it and press F9 or right click and update the field, they both
do the same thing.
And that way the Table of Contents
always reflects the content in the document.
So I hope that's been useful.
It's always good to hear from you, so any questions you have, feel free to post the
question in the comments beneath and I'll be sure to get back to you, but the best thing
you can do now is to set yourself up with a document or open a document you've already
got and put some of these principle into practice and make sure they work.
I'll see you in the next one.