The Perfect Page

Table of Contents and List of Figures

One laborious task of document preparation can be the creation of a Table of Contents or a List of Figures or Charts. However, the task can be simply accomplished by automatically generating the table or list based upon Styles and Captions.

In the section on the use of styles for Headings and the use of captions for identifying charts and graphs, we saw how to create the framework that allows for automatic generation of Tables of Contents and Lists of Tables and Figures. (See Templates and Styles and Charts, Graphs, and Captions.) Consistently applying styles within a document allows the author the luxury of automatically creating a Table of Contents after the document is complete.

Assigning Heading styles to the main sections of the document is the first step. Generally the Table of Contents is designed to show three levels of headings. Therefore the styles "Heading 1", "Heading 2", and "Heading 3" become the the signals to the software for content generation.

The document might look something like this.

After creating a document using Heading Styles, go to Insert on the Toolbar and choose Index and Tables. A dialog box will appear.

Within this box various stylistic choices can be made, from the style of the leader to manner in which the page numbers should be displayed. After making the choices, click OK. Open the Sample document to see how the automatically generated Table of Contents looks. Select the Table and delete it. Then, following the steps above, reinsert a Table of Contents at the beginning of the document.

  Sample Table of Contents Document