Hi Ross:
Thanks for adding your name ‹ makes this whole place much more friendly
Everything Jonathan West says in the article Daiya sent you to remains true
for Mac Word. However, new possibilities open up if you are using Word
2008.
There are three ways to "tell" Word which headings you want in the Table of
Contents.
* If you have formatted all your headings with the built-in Heading styles
in Word, you do not have to "do" anything. It will all "just work". If you
have not done this, by far the easiest way to proceed is to reformat the
Heading styles to your requirements and then run through and change the
formatting of the headings to the heading styles.
* If you have formatted with styles other than the built-in "Heading..."
series, you need to ensure that the "Outline Level" defined for each style
is the correct level: Level 1 is the Chapter Heading, Level 2 for Sections,
Level 3 for Sub-sections, etc. Update each style and make a mental note
that you need to use "Outline Levels" as opposed to "Styles" in your TOC
field.
* If you have not used styles at all, and you don't want to change that,
you need to run through each document and insert "TC" fields at EVERY
Heading. This is a very laborious process: use it only if the text you want
to appear in the TOC is different from the text you want in the body of the
document.
Compiling your Source
If your Mac has plenty of memory (2 GB or better...) the "Long Single
Document" method is by far the simplest.
* Create a new blank document, Save it, and then insert each of your source
documents using File>Insert File...
‹ Save the compiled document each time you insert a new file.
‹ Close all other applications before you do this to free up memory.
‹ You can easily get to 1,000 pages doing this. Things will start slowing
down a bit at 2,000 pages, but you can keep going up to about 5,500 pages if
you are determined and patient
If you are using Word 2008:
* You can use master documents, PROVIDED that every source file is a .docx
and so is your master document.
‹ If you do not have Word 2008, then forget master documents. They are too
fragile done in .doc format. You are likely to lose the lot... If you use
a mixture of formats, disaster becomes "certain"
If you are in Word 2001, or you don't have much memory, then you need to use
RD fields, and the technique Jonathan describes is the way the professionals
do it.
Just to hit the high points...
1) Create a separate blank document for your Table of Contents
2) Insert the RD fields into your Table of Contents document, ABOVE the TOC
field. On later versions of Word, the RD fields don't have to be above,
they can be anywhere provided that are in the same document as the TOC
field.
3) Jonathan will specifically caution you to "double the back-slashes" in
the path name inside the RD field. You do not need to do that on the Mac if
you use colons as path separators. If you use Unix-style forward slashes,
you do.
4) You need to set the page number in each source document to start at the
correct number before you generate the TOC. Either set it to continue from
the previous document, or to start at "1" if you choose to include the
Chapter number.
5) If you do choose to include the Chapter number, the chapter MUST start
with a numbered heading (and the heading number must be generated by a
Style, not typed) and you must tell the Page Number field which style you
are using for the Chapter number. Normally, use Heading 1.
6) You need to check the resulting generated TOC to ensure that it actually
includes all the source documents. There are no short-cuts, you have to
check the TOC against each source document. On your first and second
attempts, I will be very surprised if you don't miss at least one, or its
link doesn't work...
There's a lot you have to know, and a lot to go wrong. Are you SURE you
can't use a long single document
Hope this helps
