This beginner’s guide would help you to add basic Table of Contents in Writer document.
Table of Contents is a necessary index which is needed for every user when dealing with long documents, book drafts etc. Table of content is an index which gives user easy access to any location in the document.
In this guide, we will try to create a simple table of contents (TOC) with 3 headings and some sub-headings.
Chapter 1
Introduction
Chapter 2
Description
How to create
Chapter 3
Summary
Here’s how you can do it.
Table of Contents
Steps to Add Table of Contents
- Open the document where you want to add table of contents. Consider below document for example.
- You have to add the headings and subheadings with style to make them appear in the table of contents.
- Select the heading which would be an item in your index content. Then from the toolbar select Heading 1
- Repeat the steps for all top level headings.
- For subheading, select the corresponding text and apply style Heading 2.
- Repeat the steps for all top level headings.
- Once you have applied all the heading styles, put the cursor at the beginning of the document to create table of contents.
- From menu, select Insert > Table of contents and Index > Table of contents, Index or Bibliography.
- In the next window, Press OK.
- You can now see the table of contents added in the beginning of your document. You can CTRL+Click to follow the sections/headings from the table of contents.
- This is how you can add a basic table of contents.
Numbered List in the Table of Contents
It is often wise to add numbered list to table of contents to properly explain the hierarchy. For example –
1. Chapter 1
1.1 Introduction
2. Chapter 2
2.1 Description
2.2 How to create
3. Chapter 3
3.1 Summary
This is how you can do it.
- Select the texts where you have added Headings. From the toolbar, select Numbered Lists. Choose your favourite numbered list.
- Now, click on a subheading (having style heading 2) and select Numbered List again from the toolbar. You can see the subheading is labeled with dot and a sublist is created.
- This way, you can keep repeating the steps for all the headings, subheadings.
Add New Headings in Table of Contents
To add new headings, you can just apply the Heading 1 or Heading 2 etc to any text and it would appear in the table of contents. If you want the headings to be numbered list, you can still apply the same as well.
Update or Modify an existing Table of contents
- Once new headings are added, to update the table of contents follow below steps.
- Right click on top of the table of contents and click Update Index.
- The entire table of content would be updated with the headings from the entire document.
- If you would like to edit the table of contents, its styles, click on the Edit index in the right click context menu.
- To delete the table of contents, click on the Delete Index.
Conclusion
This is the easy way to apply table of contents in a Writer document. Drop a comment below if this article helped you or if you have any questions.
Thanks heaps, nice and easy. I have been too slack with documentation in the past. You’ve inspired me to be more professional.
Totally agree with Michael’s comment. Clearly explained and worked a treat.
Thank you. Have been trying for more than a month to generate a Table of Contents. Using help within “writer” was very miss leading. Finally tried a web search and within 10 minutes had generated ToC.
I have been trying to create a table of content and all I had to do was read this article and everything became clear. Thank you so much.
Thank you for fine tutorial. I want to open up a bit of space before and after that long dotted line that flows from the chapter on left to its page number on right. I’ve found I can put spaces in, so I guess I can do what I’m asking for. But what I really want to know is how to spec the long dotted line itself. What if I’d like to use dashes instead, or diamonds. I can’t find the character definition of that mysterious filler/object. I look forward to your advice.
Are you saying that you want to change the long dots in the table of contents with some other characters?
Geat tutorial! Was ready to tear my hair out trying to follow the instructions that come with the program when i found this site. All done in less than an hour, including changing the dreary grey background to more cheery sandy shade!
Thank you!