How to Add a Table of Contents in Word

Now that I’m back in school again after a long time, I’m also back to having to create various PowerPoint presentations and write reports up in Word. There are a lot of features in Word that most people never use unless they are in school.

One of those features is the Table of Contents. Word has a great feature that allows you to create a great-looking table of contents automatically if you know what type of headings to use. The great thing is that even if you already have a Word document with a lot of content, it’s very easy to edit it so that you can generate the table of contents automatically.

In this article, I’m going to walk you through the process of setting up your Word document with the correct headings and then talk about how to create the table of contents. I’m also going to talk about how you can customize the table of contents to your liking.

Setup and View Headers in Word

The first thing you’ll want to do before you can create any table of contents is to setup your headers. By default, the allowed headers you can use areH1 (Heading 1),H2 (Heading 2)andH3 (Heading 3).

You can find these headings in theStylesbox on the mainHometab in the ribbon. These are the only three you can use for a default TOC. If you add a custom TOC, you can also useH4 (Heading 4),H5 (Heading 5),H6 (Heading 6),Subtitle,Title, andTOC Heading.

When you are going through your document to add the different headings, feel free to pick from any of the above-mentioned headings if only H1, H2 and H3 feel too restricted. You’ll just have to insert a custom TOC and change a few settings, which I will also mention.

It’s very easy to apply headings to text in Word. Just click on the line with the text and then click on the heading style you want to apply.

Go through the document and add as many of these headings as you would like. Note that when you add headers, it will be hard to see the headers, even if you have paragraph marks visible. In order to quickly see all headers in a Word document, click on theViewtab and then check the box underNavigation Pane.

When you do this, a pane will appear on the left hand side of the document and you’ll be able to see the various headings, sub-headings, etc.

Clicking on any of the items in the list will take you to that heading in the Word document. This is a great way to quickly see your heading structure before creating your final TOC.

Adding a Table of Contents in Word

Now that we have all of our headers setup properly, let’s go ahead and insert a table of contents. First, we’ll start off with the default TOC setup in Word. Before starting, it might be a good idea to add a blank page at the beginning of your document.

To do that, go the top of your current first page and then click onInsertandBlank Page. Now click onReferences,Table of Contentsand pick from one of theAutomaticchoices at the top.

A manual table will be just filler text in the format of a table of contents, but you’ll have to manually make all the changes. When you insert the automatic TOC, you should see something like this:

Awesome! Now you have a nicely formatted TOC in your Word document! Once you have inserted the TOC, you can still make changes to the headings in your document, but the changes won’t be automatically reflected in the TOC.

In order to update the TOC, just click inside of it and then click onUpdate Tableat the top.

It will ask you if you want to update just the page numbers or the entire table. If you have modified, inserted or deleted headings, you should chooseentire table. If you just added more content to your document, but haven’t added or removed any headings, you can choosepage numbers only.

Customize Table of Contents

If you used headings other than H1, H2, and H3, you’ll notice they won’t appear in the TOC. In order to use these extra headings, you have to chooseCustom Table of Contentswhen inserting the TOC.

This will bring up the options dialog for the TOC. You can change some basic settings like whether to show the page numbers and whether to right-align the numbers or not. UnderGeneral, you can choose from multiple styles and you can also choose to show more levels beyond three, which is the H3 heading.

If you click onOptions, you can choose extra items to build the TOC with. If you scroll down, you’ll be able to selectSubtitleandTOC heading.

In order to customize the look and feel of the table of contents, you have to click on theModifybutton. If you simply right-click on the TOC and choseFontorParagraph, it won’t format the TOC. When you click on Modify, you’ll get another dialog where you can edit each TOC level. TOC 1 is H1, TOC 2 is H2, etc.

Click on the secondModifybutton and you’ll be able to change the formatting for that particular heading. So if you want, you could make all H1 headings bold and a different font size.

If you click on theFormatbutton at the bottom, you can customize even more settings like paragraph, tabs, border, frame, numbering, etc. Here’s my TOC with H1 as bold and with a bigger font size.

Lastly, if you press the CTRL key and then click on anything in the TOC, you’ll be brought to that page. However, if you find it annoying to have to press the CTRL key, you can change this by going toFile–Optionsand then clicking onAdvanced.

Go ahead and uncheck theUse CTRL + Click to follow hyperlinkbox. Now you can just click on the items in the TOC as links without holding down the CTRL key. Unfortunately, this only works on your local copy of Word. When you email it to someone and if they don’t have that setting changed, they will have to CTRL + click. That’s about it when it comes to table of contents in Word. Enjoy!

Founder of Help Desk Geek and managing editor. He began blogging in 2007 and quit his job in 2010 to blog full-time. He has over 15 years of industry experience in IT and holds several technical certifications.Read Aseem’s Full Bio

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How to Add a Table of Contents in Word#

Setup and View Headers in Word#

Adding a Table of Contents in Word#

Customize Table of Contents#