When a Word document attains a certain complexity, inserting a table of contents is urgently required. If you’re planning to add a table of contents to your documents and don’t know how to do it, read on because we’ll explain how.
First you need the section References call.
References section
There you will get the option Table of contents (Table of Contents) see. Click to continue.
Table of Contents
Word comes with a few predefined layouts that you can use to quickly add tables of contents. Choose the one you like best for your document. Keep in mind that you can change the format of the various TOC elements later.
Choose the style of the table of contents
The result should be similar to what you see in the next screenshot.
Index appearance
At this point, you now know how to add a table of contents to a Word document. However, there are a few more things we should tell you about this feature.
First: tables of contents based on the headings. Word allows you to organize your documents into hierarchies based on titles. So, in the Styles section, you’ll see options like Title, Title 1, Title 2, and so on. You should use these formats to organize your document. That way Word knows how to automatically create a table of contents. The application will nest each title according to its hierarchy.
Secondly have to the tables of contents be updated manually. If you’re adding a new section to the file, click the table of contents, then click Update Table. At this moment, the new titles you added will appear in the table of contents.
Updating the table of contents
Lastly, you should know that each entry in a table of contents contains a link. As such, these are useful not only to make the document easier to read after you print it out, but also to navigate through the document when editing in Word.