Hi everyone, my name is Kevin. Today I want to show you how you can insert a table of contents
into Microsoft Word. And as full disclosure before we jump into this, I work at Microsoft as
a full-time employee. I'm required to say that by HR anytime I talk about our products. So imagine
that you have a school report that you're working on, or maybe you're turning in a project for work,
and you've got lots of pages and lots of sections in there. Well, a table of contents can make it
easier to get back to the content that people want to refer back to. So how do you do that?
It's actually easier than you think. And I've pulled up a sample school report here. I know I've
been out of school for a little while, but brings back memories when I jump into this. Let's jump on
my PC and I'll show you how to do this. Here I am on my PC, and I am working on an important school
report. And yes, I did not copy any of this from Wikipedia. Although if I were to turn this in, I'd
probably need to clean it up a little more. Just kidding, write original content. Do not copy. So,
here's my important report, and I want to insert a table of contents right between the title, which
is just Seattle, and then my introduction. Well, what I could do is I could say, well, you know,
the introduction is on, it looks like it's on page one, so I could say introduction, and then I can
say maybe page one, and then I can go through and I can do that for each section within my document.
The problem with doing that though is as I add more text, or perhaps I remove some text, these
page locations might change. This is not a very good way to do it. In fact, as I add my table of
contents, it might push things to new pages, and then my table of contents is no longer accurate.
So, this is not the way to do a table of contents. What we want to do is we want to use Word to
automatically create a table of contents for us. Well, how do we do that? Well, before we can even
jump into inserting the table of contents, what we have to do is we have to format the Word document
properly. And as you see, what I did is for the title, I just kind of made it a little bigger, and
I bolded it. For my heading here for introduction, I just made it bold, and then I did that for my
history section, and this subheading, I just put down bold again. I mean, that's one way you
can do it, but it won't help us with the table of contents. What we have to do is we have to do it
the proper way. Well, how do we do it the proper way? So the first thing is I'm going to highlight
this, and I'm going to use what's called styles on top of the page. And this is my title, so I'm
going to go ahead and select a title style. This is my introduction, and this is just a heading.
I'm going to call it Heading 1, and I'll select that. I'll get into when you would use Heading 2,
and so forth. So, there's my Heading 1, that's my introduction, and let's go through the document
now. Well, here's history. So I have a little section on history, so I'll select Heading 1, and
now I have some information about the founding, and this is a section within history, so what
I'm going to do is I'm going to select Heading 2, because it's a subheading underneath this Heading
1. And I have all these other levels where I can even do Heading 3, and I can keep going down.
So here I have history, founding, and there's a little section on the Duwamps,
so I'm going to go ahead, that's another Heading 2, because it falls under the history section.
Here I am back to kind of the main section called geography, so I'm going to say Heading 1. Oh, we
have a section on the climate. You know, one thing is everyone always laughs at climate in Seattle,
because they always think it rains. Well, interesting little tidbit, in Seattle,
it actually rains less than it does in New York City. The reason it has a reputation
of being a rainy place is because the rain is more spread out, so you get like
a little mist that falls down, and it goes for a very long time. Although you get less overall
precipitation, it has the perception that it rains more, simply because it tends to be kind of wet
and damp a lot more often. So anyway, there's the climate section, I'll keep going down, and here's
a lot on the climate. Wow, I really typed a lot about the climate. And let's see, it looks like
we're still talking about the climate, lot of say about the climate in Seattle. And then here's some
information about the economy, I'll select Heading 1. What's interesting about Seattle is Seattle has
a lot of tech companies. You can see here it calls out Amazon.com. I work at Microsoft, another tech
company in the Seattle area, but Seattle has a lot of tech companies. So that's the section
on the economy. And then if I scroll down to the very bottom of the document, that's all I have.
Okay, the reason we did that is we wanted to prep the document for a table of contents, and so that
was pretty easy to do. But once again, we still don't have our table of contents between the title
and then my main content. Okay, so what do we do? Well, a table of contents is a type of reference,
because you're referring to where content is within the document. And so, if we look at all
these pivots on top, which one do you think makes sense to click on? Probably the one that says
References. So I'm going to go ahead and click on that. And what you'll see is right here on
the left-hand side of the bar, you have something called Table of Contents. It provides an overview
of your document by adding a table of contents. And it says text using a heading style will be
included automatically. That's awesome. So, let's go ahead and click on that. And then here you can
see that there are some automatic tables, and then you can also create a manual table here. But I'm
all about using the automatic created items, so I'll just go ahead and click on Automatic Table 1.
What you'll notice just happened is this just automatically created a table of contents for me
using all the headings that I just created. And so here it says Contents, and I have my intro
history. It even has the subheadings appear under History, Geography, Climate, and Economy. And you
see all the page numbers are accurate. If I go through and I add more content to this document,
so let's say right now the introduction's on page one. Let's say I'm going to go ahead and let's
insert a page break. So now introduction appears on page two. What I can do is I'll click on this,
and I can click on Update Table, and I can update page numbers only, or I can update
the entire table. This looks at the naming of the headers. So, I'll just click on OK,
and what you'll see is it updated all the page numbers, and it just incremented them by one,
which is kinda nice. The one thing you have to remember to do, though, is that you update the
table of contents any time. So a good time to update it is, perhaps by the time you finish up
your report and you're ready to print it out, then you could update the table of contents. As I was
saying earlier, update entire table. So let's say that introduction to my amazing school paper. So
let's say I updated that to be the title. I don't know if the teacher would love that too much.
But if I click on Update Table, if I were only to do the page numbers, it wouldn't pick that up.
But if I go to Update Table and I update the entire table, that'll pick up the new name of
that section. So that's kind of your two different options. Maybe you don't want to update the text,
which is why they give those two options. So, what we can also do is I'm going to go back
and I'm going to click on Table of Contents, and we're going to click on Custom Table of Contents.
And now what I can do within here is you'll see that it's using multiple layers or levels of the
table of contents. So I have Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3. Perhaps under that History section, I
don't want to list out all the subsections because maybe my table of contents gets really long.
So down here, you'll see I have this option that says Show Levels. And what I could do is instead
of clicking on three levels, I might just want to show one level. Here you see an example of kind of
what that looks like at the top. So I'm going to go and just drop it to one and then click on OK.
And here you see under the History section, it removed my two subheadings from the table
of contents. All right, well, there you have it. That's how you insert a simple table of contents
into Microsoft Word. So if you have a school report, maybe you have a business project that
needs a table of contents, that's how you insert it. That's how you update the page numbers. That's
how you update the headings. It's all pretty simple to do. Word does all the heavy lifting
for you. You don't have to manually go through and update page numbers anymore. So hey, bravo,
makes it a lot easier. If you watched this video and you were able to insert a table of contents
into whatever type of project you're working on, please give this video a thumbs up. If you want
to see more videos like this in the future, more tutorials, hit that Subscribe button. That way
you'll get a notification anytime new content like this comes out. And if there are any other videos
that you want me to cover in the future, any other tutorials that you're just itching to learn how to
do, leave a comment down below and I'll add it to my list of videos to create in the future.
And hey, that's all I have for you today. I hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you next time. Bye.