Table of Contents Shows ALL Headings?

[Jonathan]

HI - I'm using Word 2003 and have a document I've been working on for six
months. It's now about 200 pages. I've tried to keep it simple, but it has
quite a few headings and sub-headings (just two levels though).

For no apparent reason, the other day I noticed the document map was showing
all the headings, and not just the first level ones as it used to.

Now, the table of contents seems to be showing all headings, and even some
body text.

Is there anything I can do about this? Is the document about to corrupt?

Jonathan

 

[Margaret Aldis]

You've been caught by

a) bad behaviour of the Document Map, whereby it reassigns Outline Levels
to paragraphs in the document according to its own ideas of what the
structure might be (see http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/documentmap/ )

b) using the default setting for the TOC to pick up headings by Outline
Level - it's generally more controllable if you use Styles

If you've otherwise used Styles consistently, then you can get back to where
you were by using Ctrl-Q to reset paragraphs to Style, which should take
things back to the correct Outline Level for the style. Even if you can't
reset everything, you can probably get a quick fix on the TOC by editing the
TOC field (from the right-click menu), and using the TOC Options to build
the TOC from your heading and subheading Styles.

If you haven't used Styles, I'd strongly advise you to do so now, but if you
can't you will have to correct the Outline Levels by hand (and avoid using
the Doc Map).

 

[Jonathan]

If you've otherwise used Styles consistently, then you can get back to
where you were by using Ctrl-Q to reset paragraphs to Style, which should
take things back to the correct Outline Level for the style. Even if you
can't reset everything, you can probably get a quick fix on the TOC by
editing the TOC field (from the right-click menu), and using the TOC
Options to build the TOC from your heading and subheading Styles.

Wow! Thanks! That worked a treat. Looks like the document map is still
fighting with the TOC from time to time but at least I now know how to fix
it.