Can't get Table of Contentents to work

[Jim]

I am running Microsoft Office 10.1.5 on a PowerBOOK G3, 500 MHz using Apple OS X Panther 10.3.2 Inside of WORD X, I cannot get the TABLE OF CONTENTS function using the "index and tables" option on the "Insert" menu to work. I keep getting the following message; Error! No table of contents entries found.

 

[Elliott Roper]

I am running Microsoft Office 10.1.5 on a PowerBOOK G3, 500 MHz using Apple
OS X Panther 10.3.2 Inside of WORD X, I cannot get the TABLE OF CONTENTS
function using the "index and tables" option on the "Insert" menu to work. I
keep getting the following message; Error! No table of contents entries
found.

That was probably because you no table of content entries.

Have a paddle in the options... panel in the insert->index and
tables->table of contents panel.

Word normally includes paragraphs with heading styles 1,2 and 3 in the
TOC.
You may choose other styles, and you may explicitly flag items to
include in the TOC (I think). With none of those you will get the error
message you got.

 

[John McGhie [MVP - Word]]

Hi Jim:

Just to expand on what Elliott said: Word compiles a table of contents by
marking heading paragraphs one of three ways:

* With the built-in Heading 1 through Heading 9 styles

* Using the Outline Level property of the paragraph

* By surrounding the text with TC tags

You can choose whichever method suits your purpose, but I never use anything
but the built-in heading styles. Anything else involves thought and work,
and having "thought" it seems silly to me to "work".

So: Run through and set your headings using the built-in Heading styles.

Then insert a new table of contents, and this time set the option to
"Styles". There you go: the job is done.

Your problem is probably due to the fact that you are not using the Heading
series of styles, which means you needed to define an Outline Level on each
of the styles you did use, and you needed to choose those styles in the
Table of Contents options. Or you may have chosen to build your Table of
Contents from Table Entry Fields, in which case you also needed to go
through and insert a TC tag at each heading and copy the text of the heading
into it. Enough already...

Many newcomers to Word believe that you are supposed to make up your own
styles for your text. No, that is the reverse of what was intended. What a
professional will do is customise the hell out of the built-in styles so
that they exactly suit his purpose. However, the built-in styles have a
whole raft of properties pre-defined that fit them for their intended
purpose: particularly the Heading and List series. Trying to create a style
from scratch to emulate that functionality means you will be there forever,
and you will forget something, and it all won't work...

It is very rare that I would suggest that the people who made Word had even
the slightest clue as to how a professional works with a document, but
building styles is one of them. Obviously, the Dreaded and Dilbertian
Microsoft Marketing Droids never understood styles well enough to interfere
with them

Hope this helps

This responds to article

I am running Microsoft Office 10.1.5 on a PowerBOOK G3, 500 MHz using Apple OS
X Panther 10.3.2 Inside of WORD X, I cannot get the TABLE OF CONTENTS
function using the "index and tables" option on the "Insert" menu to work. I
keep getting the following message; Error! No table of contents entries found.

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John McGhie, Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. GMT + 10 Hrs
+61 4 1209 1410, mailto:[email protected]