Easily add a Table of Contents in MS Office 2007/2010

The following trick may look extremely simple. But since they are unaware of this neat trick, most of the MS Office users follow a very rigorous path to add a simple Table of Contents to their documents. In doing so they waste so much time.

Simply follow the following steps to add your very own Table of Contents. (The screens shots are taken from MS Office Word 2010. But the process is the same with MS Word 2007.)

Step 1:

Add your titles in the document.

Step 2:

Now select your main heading and go to the Home tab –> Styles group –> Heading 1

(Heading 1 for main headings, Heading 2 for sub headings, Heading 3 for sub-sub headings etc.,)

Step 3:

Do the same for  the sub heading. But his time select Heading 2, since it’s a sub heading.

Step 4:

Now go to a blank page where you want to display the Table of Contents.

Select the References tab –> Table of Contents group –> Click on the Table of Contents command

There you will find three options. First two are just the same except for their title. 3rd option is the manual version of the table of contents and I recommend not to use it until you are familiar with the basics. For the time being I’ve selected the 2nd option.

And voilà you have just created your custom Table of contents within seconds. The procedure is the sae even if you have hundreds of headings and sub-heading.