hi there Jamie Keet here today at teachers tech hope you're having a great day today
today I want to show you how you can quickly add a table of contents to your Microsoft word document
so what we're going to do in this lesson here today is add this table of contents to
this document here and i'm going to share this document with you down below in the description
where you can click on it and download it it might for microsoft word and open it up
it's not going to have the table of contents like this in it and i'm going to be showing you how you
can add this and it doesn't take very much time at all so if you're following along go ahead open up
that document and then we will go from there so if you're following along with the document this
is the document that i'm working on right now the title and the headings all they are are bolded so
i haven't added any styles and that's what i'm going to show you how to do and what i find is
a lot of people when they create their table of contents they don't realize how quickly you could
do it if you use the built-in how it generates forward what they tend to do is they'll go to
maybe a heading and then they just bold it like this one is and increase the font size larger than
the other font and then they go through and then just put the page numbers in after there's a much
easier way to do this and that's using the styles and so i'm just going to click up in the title up
here and i'm going to add a style to it but before i do that i'm just going to go to my view tab here
and in the ribbon just click on this navigation pane here as i add the title and headings you're
going to see it kind of what what's happening a little bit better so inside this so i'm going
to click on this line right here microsoft word tutorial i'm going to go back to home
and these styles right here you can see that there is a title one i'm going to go ahead and click on
it it quickly changes and this is classified as the title now i'm going to go to this line
here and this is going to be a heading so it's a subheading not that main title but i'm going
to call this heading 1 and you can see how this changes now i do want to point out you can make
custom styles too so for example this one right here is one a custom one that would match the font
to this i'll show you how to create your custom style for these headings at the end of this video
but just for this demo here i'm going to go ahead and use this heading one and i'm gonna go down to
this one and turn it into heading one i'm just gonna do a few of these and you can do as many
as you want here but i'm gonna go to the next one here and add just this one more so you can see on
the side i have three three different headings in the navigation pane happening i wanted to
point out if i go back uh to this one right here word templates and i just click on the line if i
turn this to heading two now you can see how it's been indented it's like a subheading of this and
you could go heading three like this so if i went into even further on and click here into number
three you can see how that becomes a subheading of that one so it's quick to make those changes
and you can see how it adjusts just by clicking on any of these now uh the other thing i just
wanted to point out you can if you do highlight it you do you can get your styles right here too
and you can see you have all the different uh ones that you can pick so i'm just gonna i'm
gonna leave this one right here as a subheading just when i generate it and i'll change it after
uh for it but i'm gonna go through and just populate uh click on the heading one for all these
and then i'm gonna get back we'll generate our table of contents so i went through the document
anytime i saw one of those bolded headings i used the style and turned it into heading one except
for this word templates are still heading to the other reason i like having this navigation pane
open when i add my headings from the styles like this i can jump around just by clicking on these
navigation pane in the navigation pane so i it allows you in especially a big document to get
to find what you're looking for so i'm just going to go back to the beginning i'm actually going to
change a couple more things here i want to take this heading here and i'm going to change it to
a just a heading 2 also so you can see a heading two and i'm going to take this how to zoom one
uh here and change it to a heading three like this oops i better do the whole thing here
and style three just like that so you can see i have uh two different ones here how
it sets up with the sub pages on it so now i'm going to go ahead and insert my table
of contents and i want to put this i'm going to put a page in before this and insert that
table of contents because i know it's going to eat up a bit of room because it's a fairly long one
to get to the table of contents i go and click on the references tab and you'll see that over on the
left we have table of contents here now i'm going to insert a page first i'm going to go and we'll
just put a page break here and i'm going to make sure i'm at the top here and i'm going to insert
the the table of conference table of contents here so back to references and table of contents
i'm just going to click on it and you can see i have from the automatic table 1 automatic table 2
and the manual table i'm going to click on the first one and what it did and i can go through
actually i'm going to leave it like this because i'm just going to show i'm going to make some
adjustments here this page got put in i'm just going to delete a spot there so it comes back up
right like that so we have our table of contents you can see it has all the pages in it uh look
at where i put the headings and subheadings how it indented automatically on that and i'm going
to show you how you can make some adjustments uh to kind of customize your table of contents too
but what happens if something changes on it so do you have to redo everything or how quickly can you
redo it well let's say if i go to here i'm going to change these table contents here i'm going to
go to this word one here and i'm going to go and just turn it back to a heading 1. now if i go back
to my table of contents nothing has changed on this but i just want to point out look at this as
i click in the table of contents i can update the table of contents so if i click on this it asks me
do i want update the page numbers only or update entire table well i made a change to the actual
where this is going to be the page numbers are going to change so i'm going to say
entire table on this one and you can see it just automatically
changed over so even if there's a page number if you insert more uh more headings using the
style and add another chunk you can go ahead and update your table and it's going to automatically
uh update to this so if the pages change on a bit on some of it so if i i was on this word
template that i know is on on page two and i'm just gonna push it down uh to page three here
just like that and then if i go back up again you're gonna see a change here as i click in it
update this time i'll only do the page numbers hit ok and i saw a couple changes in the numbers here
right let's look at some of the other options that i mentioned before in the table of contents
so i want to point out some ways you could customize your table if you go up back to table of
contents contents in the ribbon drop down and you can see that there is a custom table of contents
if you click on that you'll get this table of contents box and you can see where you
can adjust things do you want the page numbers to show gives you a little preview up here it
doesn't change anything yet until you hit ok and update it and you can see the different options
i have different levels that i can show so word templates that's level one how to set a default
level two and how to zoom level three so if i went and said to change it to two levels
hit ok and said yes right now then the how to zoom is gone out of the table of contents it's not gone
as a heading if i look over on the navigation pane it's still there it's just not added to my table
of contents because it wasn't a level i didn't want to add to it now you can quickly delete
these tables too you can click drop down on this and you'll see how you can remove tables
or change it to different tables also you can remove it this way from here now i did mention
about making a custom style and i'm going to go back to home here and we're going to make a
custom style for a heading how you do this is if you drop down you can see that there's a create a
style when you hit create a style you can give it a name i'm just going to leave this at style one
click on modify and you get all these different options here so you can see from the name what do
you want this to be style and you can go through so is this going to be a maybe a heading 5 and
you would go through and pick what you want out of all these what type of font do you want what type
of color and you could pick all these styles so if i go ahead and add you know we'll just so you can
see it just like this and we'll leave it i will go orange and i'll hit okay and so that was style one
it gives a little preview so at any time if i was going to go back to any of these here and i click
on this style you can see how it quickly changes remember that's a level five if even if i updated
it it wouldn't show my table of contents here so i hope you like this little tutorial on how to add a
table of contents to word i think about setting it up this way from the get go adding your headings
as you go along because it can help with just navigation on the side of the navigation pane
uh and it'll just make it easier to kind of just help you organize your document and remember you
can make those quick changes and update your table of contents when you're finished too so thanks
for watching this week on teachers tech i'll see you next time with more tech tips and tutorials