How to create table of contents for your Word 2007 thesis, dissertation or other documents

A table of contents is an essential part of any academic document such thesis, dissertation, research report, etc. If you produce any of these documents as part of your job, then you will need to know how to give those documents a table of contents.

Do you know that you can actually create a table of contents for your document easier than you thought? Many people create a table of contents in traditional way and manually and with lots of effort. Sure, you can produce a nice table of contents this way (especially after the document is printed), but it is definitely laborius. This way is recommendable!

Follow steps in this hub on how to create an instant table of contents for your documents created with Microsoft Word 2007.

Please be informed that there is a prerequisite you have to fulfill before you can produce a table of contents for your Word 2007 documents. That is implementing Heading style in your documents. This is not so hard to do. Once you grab some basic and important principles on this technique for a heading level, you can apply the principles to other heading levels. And with correct heading styles, creating a table of contents is done with few clicks!

To learn how to use heading style in Word 2007, including how to number your chapter, see this hub on Chapter Numbering in Word 2007. Table of contents creation and heading style application go hand in hand.

After you implemented heading styles to your document, let us now create a table of contents.

1. Position your cursor where you want the table of contents to appear. It is usually on a page in front, under a heading called Table of Contents.
2. Under References menu, click Table of Contents and then Insert Table of Contents to create it manually so you can have the real knowledge about this (see Image 1 on the right).
3. In the appearing window, deselect 'use hyperlinks instead of page numbers' under web preview.
4. Click OK for now. You can make revision next time, now is to see how it looks like.

It will be like the Image 2 below. You can see that the table of contents comes with page number for each of the headings.

To modify your table of contents, you can do it through Style panel on the right of your screen.

1. Expand the style panel, and you can see TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 3, and so on (see Image 3) depending how many levels you have included in your table of contents. TOC 1 is for Heading 1 (chapter), TOC 2 is for Heading 2 (sub-chapter), TOC 3 for Heading 3 (sub sub-chapter), etc
   
2. Click small arrow in each of TOC box in the Style panel to see Modify button and click that Modify button to bring up its window. Do modification as you like for each TOC level.
   

You can create your table of contents at any stage of your document creation. You do not have to wait until the document has been created completely for you to give a table of contents. You can create your table of contents and add more headings and contents to your document. But, of course, you need to update your table of contents so that it includes all the newly added materials to your document.

To update your table of contents:

1. Right click your table of contents
2. Click Update Field
3. Click Update entire table