Word 2003 TOC troubles

[Janet]

Hello -- I teach technical writing classes online. As a part of one of my
classes, I teach people how to use paragraph styles and generate a TOC. One
of my students is using Word 2003 and having problems that result in a dialog
box I've never seen being opened. She says that when she clicks OK on the
Table of Contents tab to generate the TOC, a dialog box opens that tells her
the following:

To add or remove items in the TOC: 1) Select text in your document 2) Click
the outline level in the toolbar to make the text appear in the table of
contents.

She's sure that she's applying her paragraph styles correctly and she
checked the Table of Contents Options dialog box to make sure that the first
three Heading styles are selected.

She says that in response to the above message, she "found the 'outline
level' box in the upper left corner of the toolbar and clicked onto "level 1"
instead of "body text" where it was set by default. Then my info magically
appeared in the TOC format, including the title."

Her biggest concerns are that 1) her title, which comes in front of the TOC,
is added after the TOC near the bottom of the next page, and 2) the words
Table of Contents are included in her TOC.

We obviously have several things going on here. My biggest question is what
is this dialog box that she's seeing after she clicks OK on the Table of
Contents tab? What triggers it and how do we shut it off? Could it be the
reason for her other problems? Thank you for your help.

 

[Stefan Blom]

The error message indicates that whatever the inserted TOC is looking for
(styles, outline levels, TC fields) wasn't found in the document.

Note that in order to find out exactly what the TOC is looking for, you will
have to look at its field code; the dialog box always shows the default
settings for table of contents creation. If you press Alt+F9 (to show/hide
field codes), what is being displayed?

To exclude the words "Table of Contents" from the TOC, make sure it isn't
being recognized as a TOC entry (one way or the other).

For more, general information on TOC creation, see
http://www.shaunakelly.com/word/toc/CreateATOC.html.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

By default, a TOC is based on outline levels. Word's built-in heading styles
have built-in outline levels; if you create your own heading styles, you
need to make sure that an outline level other than Body Text is set in the
paragraph formatting. You can also change the outline level of a given style
(just for the TOC) in the TOC Options dialog.

To omit a title or the Table of Contents heading, you need to remove the
Level 1 formatting for the Title style and the style used for the Table of
Contents heading. Instead of using Heading 1 for the TOC heading, I create a
style called TOC Head that is identical to Heading 1 but has an outline
level of Body Text.

Similarly, if Heading 1 is numbered and I have front matter that requires
unnumbered Level 1 headings, I create a style identical to Heading 1 (but
not based on it) with an outline level of Level 1 but no numbering.

For more, see http://sbarnhill.mvps.org/WordFAQs/TOCTips.htm

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org