Formatting a large document can be a tedious process. Between pagination, making sure that chapter headings work correctly and making a table of contents, you might think you need someone to manage these things full time. You don’t, though. Word can do a lot of this for you. Today we’re going to look at two things – customizing a Style so that you can have a chapter title appear on a new page each time, and then using those styles to create a table of contents.

Customizing Word Styles

This is a lot less esoteric than you’d think. As always, right-click is your friend.

You’ll right-click on the style you want to modify. In our example, we want Heading 1 to be our chapter title and we want that chapter to start on its own page. So, we right-click on Heading 1 on the Home tab in the Styles group.

So, we’re going to change the style, right? Modify is another word for change. Let’s click on it and see what happens.

Lookie there! We get the Modify style dialog box.

Now, from here, we’re going to need to change the way a style is formatted. Using our superior powers of deduction, we’re going to look and see what we can press to do that. Wouldn’t you know it, there is a Format button for us to click on.

This is less intuitive. We’re going to need to click on Paragraph. I know, not as obvious as it could be in this case.

Now by default, it is going to show you the Indents and Spacing tab. What you really need in this case is the Page and Line Breaks. Once you’ve clicked on that, select Page Break Before. Then click okay to close the Page and Line Breaks tab, and click OK to close the Modify styles window.

Now, you don’t have to manually add a page break each time you start a new chapter. Just format the chapter with a Heading 1 style, and you’re good to go!

Creating a Table of Contents

Adding a table of contents

You can use Word to generate a table of contents from headings in a document. To be included in the table of contents, text must be formatted in a Heading style such as Heading1 or Heading 2.

You can select a table of contents from a gallery of style options. To do so:

1. Activate the References tab.
2. Click Table of Contents.
3. Select the desired style.

However, the thing that makes this impressive is not the fact that you can generate the table of contents. It is that you can then update the table at any time. If you decide to add a few pages of material to your document somewhere in the middle, instead of tediously going through and changing the page references on the table of contents, all you have to do is click on the Update Table button when you have selected the table of contents. It’s a serious timesaver. Try it some time!