This lesson will focus on how Word uses styles to generate a TOC. To use Word to generate a TOC automatically, there are some Word fundamentals that you should understand completely: Just for fun, I’ll explain how to change the page numbers between the title page, the introductory pages, and the body of the document so that the right page numbers appear in the TOC.

I’ll cover how to build multilevel tables of contents and how to customize the look of TOC entries in the body of the document and in the TOC itself. If you’re someone who has used Word for years but never figured out how to generate a table of contents (TOC), consider this your crash course. A number of TechRepublic members responded saying, “Hey, some of our users don’t even know how to apply styles, much less how to use them to generate a table of contents!” When I wrote “Teach Word users the six benefits of a table of contents,” I was making the point that good technical documents should always contain a table of contents. Learn how to create and customize tables of contents in Word and pass these tips on to your users. Users who create long documents in Word could use some instruction on creating tables of contents.

A crash course in building a table of contents in Word

Word table of contents troubleshooting