Table of Contents and Index

[Joe Shanahan]

I work for a large state agency and our Personnel Manual is in Word 2003. We
began the manual about 10 years ago in the version of Word available then.
For a while, we could update the Table of Contents automatically whenever we
made changes to the manual.

At some point, the update feature stopped working. We contacted Microsoft
and were told our manual had become too complicated, with too many sections
and subsections and we had exceeded the capabilities of the software. Since
then, we have been manually updating the TOC and Index.

This has become very cumbersome. We like having the manual in Word for a
number of reasons. Our plan is to completely retype the manual and try to
have the automatic updates work the way they were designed.

Before taking this on, we would like to know what kind of limitations are in
Word 2003 for doing this. What are the limite for, say, the number of
Chapters, sections, subsections, etc?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Any limitations, I would think, would be imposed more by available RAM and
HD size. But it's also true that earlier versions of Word tended to
duplicate bookmarks when the TOC was replaced (not necessarily when it was
just updated), and I believe there is a limitation on the number of
bookmarks in the doc. Recent versions of Word have corrected these problems,
so it might be worth a try, if you're using Word 2003 or 2007, to generate a
TOC field and see what happens.