Hi Patty/Louisa:
Patty, what you say is quite correct, but unless you know what you are
doing, you are likely to get into "more trouble" by using something other
than the built-in "Heading" styles.
Louisa: Your description is very characteristic of damage caused by
unresolved Tracked Changes. If you enable Track Changes in a document, it
duplicates lumps of text to show adds and deletions.
The Table of Contents Generator adds a series of bookmarks around each
"heading". If Track Changes has unresolved changes in there, often you get
the indication you are suffering, where "half the book" ends up in the TOC.
Sorting this out is straight-forward once you understand what has happened,
but it can be very laborious!
1) Make a copy of that document (we're going to do some major surgery here,
so we need a back-up we can go back to...)
2) Accept ALL changes in the document, then save, close, and re-open it.
Now try. I am particularly interested in " I am trying to change all the
headings into Heading 1, but I click apply and it wont let me.". I want to
know what does it do 'instead'?
You should be in Page Layout View, with your Paragraph Marks turned on so
you can see what you are doing. Click the "Show/Hide" button on the
Standard toolbar to make the paragraph marks visible.
All formatting for a paragraph is contained in the paragraph mark at the end
of that paragraph: if you cannot see the para marks, you go spinning out of
control.
Similarly, if you hide tracked changes in the document, you cannot see what
you are doing.
3) Now, open the Toolbox, open the Styles segment, and scroll so you can
see Heading 1.
4) Click in a heading so the cursor is just an insertion point. Do not
select any text. The rules all change if you select text.
5) Click "Heading 1" in the Formatting Palette (the Toolbox).
The result should be that the paragraph you clicked in should instantly
change to the formatting of Heading 1 style. If it doesn't, tell us what
happens instead.
Due to a bug in Word, if you have any text selected when you click the
Heading 1 style, Word applies a CHARACTER style named Heading 1 instead of
the paragraph style you need for the TOC generator. After that, very
strange things can happen.
Patty is quite correct, you can use any style you like in a Table of
Contents, but that means the number of possible variations to the process
becomes very large, and it makes it very difficult to configure the Table of
Contents to allow for all the variations. You can do it, but it's the
advanced course
I suspect your document will come right when you accept all changes. If it
doesn't, stick with us, we'll help you bring that critter back under
control.
Hope this helps
Although defining one's headlines using styles Headings 1-9 is the
traditional way to set up things for a ToC, Louisa should actually
be able to create a ToC from whatever style the headlines are currently
in, right? I just encountered this the other day when I realized that
my main headings in a certain document (whose styles weren't defined by
me) weren't getting captured in the ToC. I went into the Options section
of the ToC dialog box and defined Main Title as the Level 1 ToC entry
and Heading 1 as the Level 2 ToC entry. Worked perfectly.
Since Louisa is having trouble applying Headline 1 to her headlines
(and I don't know why that would be), perhaps she should just go with
the flow and use the existing style for her ToC. Of course, if the
existing style of the headlines is the same as the style for the body
copy, then she's got a problem.
She'll need apply a different style
to the headlines one way or another, whether it's called Heading 1 or
something else.
Patty
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John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
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