How to Make a Table of Contents in Word
How many times have you bought and read an ebook and lo and behold it is just basic “flat” text on a few pages? I don’t know about you but I have “tasted” what it is like to use an eBook that is somewhat dynamic. You know the ones that have a table of contents that you can jump right to the text you want to see. Slick.
Now as a writer of eBooks and short reports I wanted to learn this trick to make my own books more user friendly. I thought maybe you could use the tips too.
To create a linked ToC in Word 2003 (sorry, I like it better for this feature than 2007), you need to select the Outlining toolbar from View>Toolbars.
Then just go through your text and click your cursor on the line (it selects the whole line even if you just put the cursor on there).
Go up to the Outline Toolbar and select the Level 1 through 9 (i think). This is where you use your outlining skills from school. 
You know, chapters are level one; major points – level two; sub point – level 3, etc.
When you are done outlining, place your cursor in the doc right where you want the table to appear (right after your title page), go to Insert>Reference>Tables and Indexes and choose Table of Contents tab.
You can choose a style of table, so mess around with it. Make sure to select the number of levels if it is more than the default of 3 and click ok.
Ta da! Hopefully you did a nice clean job of outlining or you may have a lot of unwanted text. If you see stuff you don’t want, jump to that text; make sure to label it “body text” if you don’t want it included in the toc. Then go back to the Outling toolbar and click replace entire table. Keep at it till it is clean.
I like a uniform looking ToC so I highlight the whole thing, choose the font style, size and weight to all be the same. I mess with it a bit but hey.
I know I wished someone taught me how easy it is to make a “jump to” ToC for my ebooks. Hope this helps!
Tags:create Table of Contents,ebook,how to write ebooks,how to write reports,short reports
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