How to create your thesis with Word 2007 and 2010: Step 9 - How to Create an Automatic Table of Content

Creating an automatic table of contents for a structured document like thesis in Word 2007 or 2010 is the most fun to do. It is even more enjoyable if you have numbered your chapter and sub chapter headings with multilevel list numbering. I recommend you to see previous articles on how to do this.

In the previous articles, we have created a document called Academic Document 4 which has applied Heading styles to chapters and sub chapters and we have also numbered them appropriately. We have also separated each chapter with a section break.

Follow below steps on how to create a table of contents for your thesis or other similar documents

1. Open your Academic Document 4
2. Create an empty space before Chapter 1 or anywhere you want to place your Table of Contents, but make sure the empty space has a 'Normal' style
3. Under Reference menu, click Table of Contents and then Insert Table of Contents (see image below)
 
4. In the appearing box, clear box next to 'Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers'

5. Click OK
6. Save Academic Document 4 into Academic Document 5

Your Table of Contents will look like below:

 

And you can see in the Style Panel that styles for Table of Content levels are also created automatically. They are called TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 3, etc.

Posted in: Table of Contents,Thesis