Taking Control of Your Table of Contents or Document Map
As discussed in this previous post, table of contents and the Document Map are designed to work best with documents that use styles. Styles not only apply a look and feel to a document, but also provide semantic structure. For example, applying a Heading 2 style to some content that exists under a Heading 1 style implies hierarchy within a document.
Technically speaking, this hierarchy is represented as Outline Levels within paragraphs. In the case of heading styles, each heading level is formatted with the appropriate built-in heading style. For example, Heading 3 applies an outline level of Level 3. This hierarchy is easily represented within a Document Map or table of contents because Word will indent content based on outline levels. In other words, Heading 2 appears indented compared to Heading 1.
What happens if you want to apply one of these styles, say Heading 1, to a paragraph for the look, but don't want that paragraph to show in your document hierarchy (via the Document Map or table of contents? What do you do?
Well, I was asked this question recently and thought it would make for a good post on our blog.
To illustrate the scenario, let's say I want to make this document below (notice the table of contents and Document Map):
Look like this document below (notice the change in the table of contents and Document Map, but not the look of the document):
There are several ways you can accomplish this scenario, but here is one way:
- Open up your Word document that you want to modify
- Place your insertion point (IP; it's the blinking cursor you see when you click anywhere in a document) in any text that has a Heading 1 style applied
- Right click
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Click on Styles | Save Selection as a New Quick Style as shown below:
- At this point you are creating a new style that looks the same as Heading 1. You can call this new style anything you would like
- At this point you will see this new style appear in the Quick Styles gallery on the Home tab. In the Quick Styles gallery right click your new style that you created
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Click modify
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In the Modify Style dialog, click on Format | Paragraph, which is at the bottom left of the dialog
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In the Paragraph dialog, change Outline Level to Body Text
- Click OK to get out of the Paragraph dialog
- Click Ok to get out of the Modify Style dialog
At this point you have a new style that looks like Heading 1, but will not be seen in the table of contents or Document Map. Apply this new style to all text that you do not want to show up in the Table of contents or Document Map. Do not forget to update your table of contents to see changes take effect.
Thanks,
Zeyad Rajabi
