In this post I will show you how to make a pain-free table of contents for your documents. I will be using Google Docs but the exact same techniques apply to Microsoft Word, Pages, and Libre Office, with just some things being labelled differently. If you prefer to follow along with a video, you can watch that here:
This is a very simple operation but a lot of people seem to miss it, and try to build their table of contents manually. This might work ok if you’re working on a short document, but if you’re writing anything longer it very quickly becomes a mess. And even if you manage to nail it down, you add an image or change the font size, and boom, you have to renumber all the entries.
So what can you do instead? First off, make sure all the headings you want in your table of contents are marked with Heading styles.
Then, you go to the place in your document where you want your table of contents to go, head to the “Insert” menu and head to the table of contents. Select “Table of contents” and you’re good to go.
creates the following:
Headers creating using Heading 2, Heading 3 styles etc will be indented under their parent heading, which lets you have a nice hierarchical table of contents.
If you move stuff around later, you will just need to head back to your table and select refresh table – and easy as that, all the page numbers are updated.
This is the same way I built the table of contents for my book a few years ago, and let me tell you there’s no way I would have been able to do it manually.
There’s another bonus that comes with styles: styles let you change all items of the same type in one go, so if at some point you decided that all your headings should be in a particular font (in the video I set it to comic sans, here I’m changing it back because comic sans is an abomination), you can just go ahead and edit one heading, right click, and hit “Update `heading 1` to match”. And all the headings of the same type will get updated to match. Again, simple tip but one that many people seem to miss so I hope this will save a lot of frustration.
I hope this was helpful, and if you enjoyed this content please consider sharing this post with someone who might find it useful.
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