How to create a Table of Contents in Word 2016. Step 2 Click the “Table of Contents” button and choose one of the available preset styles Step 3 Word looks through your document and uses the headings to generate the Table of Contents. It calculates the correct page number reference and adds it to each entry. A blank page near the start of your document is ideal for a TOC. Click the mouse to place the insertion pointer on the blank page. The TOC field is inserted at that point. Click the References tab. In the Table of Contents group, click the Table of Contents button. The Table of Contents menu appears. Choose a format.
Adding a table of contents (TOC) to a long Word document is easy, thanks to the user interface options in the Ribbon versions. But there's more to the feature than you might realize. The TOC is actually built from a field you can manually alter. In fact, doing so is the only way to apply some of the feature's more advanced options. In this article, I'll show you two such features: We'll omit page numbers from individual levels and generate a partial TOC.
I'm using Word 2013 with Windows 7 but you can easily apply these instructions to all of Word's ribbon versions. You can work with any simple document or download the demonstration .docx file.
Preparation
This article assumes that you're familiar with Word's TOC feature and fields. If you're not, you might want to read How to insert a table of contents into a Word document before you continue with this article—but doing so isn't strictly necessary to follow this article.
There are no instructions for Word 2003 in this article. If you'd like to learn more about generating a TOC using Word 2003, please review the following articles at Microsoft.com:
About Word's TOC field
In a nutshell, fields are dynamic placeholders. More specifically, a field is a set of instructions that perform an action automatically. You probably use them often without realizing it. For instance, when you insert a page number into a document's header, you're inserting a field. As Word evolves and offers more feature via the interface, fields are less visible, but you're still using them.
Word's Ribbon-based interface does such a good job of walking users through the process of generating a TOC, most don't realize that the resulting TOC is actually a field. And more options are available if you know how to modify the underlying field. You may never need these features, but it's good to know they're available just in case.
Before we continue with the actual TOC technique, let's examine a TOC field. Figure A shows a typical TOC. On the surface; it appears to be ordinary text—but there's more than meets the eye. To expose the field that controls the TOC, click inside the TOC and press [Alt]+[F9.] Figure B shows the TOC's field and switches.
Figure AYou can't see the TOC's underlying field.Figure BPress [Alt]+[F9] to see the TOC field's switches.
The field tells you everything you need to know. TOC is the identifier, the table of contents field. Everything else is a switch with arguments:
If you know how to interpret the switches, you can quickly discern that this TOC has four levels. The first three use the built-in heading styles and a fourth is based on a custom style to generate hyperlinked entries. The first three switches are defaults; t was added to display annotations for the third-level entries. To learn how to annotate an entry, read Use a custom style to annotate a Word table of contents.
For a complete list of TOC switches, read Field codes: TOC (Table of Contents) field.
Omit page numbers
The annotations shown in Figure A are the result of applying a custom style to the TOC's fourth level. When annotating a section, you probably won't want to include the (default) page number and you can't turn them off using a dialog interface option.
When generating the TOC, you can uncheck the Display Page Numbers option, shown in Figure C to disable all page numbering. Doing so adds the n switch to the field code. For example, if we had done this in our example, the field code would be { TOC o '1-3' n h z t 'TOC Summary,4' }. The resulting TOC would have no page numbers.
Figure CDisable page numbering in the TOC.
What you can't do via the interface is disable page numbering for a specific level — it's an all-or-nothing setting. Fortunately, you can manually alter the field code to disable page numbering for a specific level by specifying the level in an x-z format where x is the first level and z is the last. To disable page numbering for the annotation level (the fourth level), add 4-4 to the switch, as shown in Figure D.
Figure DManually specify a level to disable page numbering for that level.
After altering the field, press [Alt]+[F9]. Then, right-click and choose Update Field. In the resulting dialog, choose Update Entire Table and click OK to generate the new TOC, shown in Figure E.
Figure ERemove page numbers for a specific level.Add a partial TOC
You might want to include a partial TOC for specific sections. For this, you'll use the b switch and a bookmark. First, select the section in question. In the example document, we'll select the entire Quick Themes section:
To create the bookmark, do the following:
![]() Figure FEnter a name for your bookmark.
Now, generate the partial TOC as follows:
Figure GType this text inside the brackets.Figure HGenerate a partial TOC.TOC codes add flexible solutions
Once you're beyond basics, you can use field code switches to add more advanced TOC features. There's almost nothing you can't accomplish with the right switch and a bit of creative strategy.
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Also read..Other TOC techniques?
What customization tricks have you accomplished by tweaking Word's TOC field? How about other fields? Share your tips with fellow TechRepublic members.
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The trick to creating a tablet of contents, or TOC, for your document is to use Word 2016’s Heading styles. Use Heading 1 for main heads, Heading 2 for subheads, and Heading 3 for lower-level heads and titles. Word’s Table of Contents command uses those formats to build a table of contents field, which reflects the heading names and their page numbers.
Providing that you’ve used the Heading (or equivalent) styles in your document, follow these steps to create a table of contents:
How To Use Manual Table Of Contents In Word Mac 2016 Free
Above the TOC, you may also want to add a title — something clever, such as Table of Contents. Do not format that title as a heading unless you want it included in the table of contents.
How To Use Manual Table Of Contents In Word Mac 2016 Version
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