I have done articles in the not so distant past covering the creation of a table of contents in your Word documents, based on built-in heading styles. And that works just great.
But, if you are working with more than one document, that method will not work for you. Don’t get me wrong, you can still generate a table of contents but you will do it differently. There is no built in method to create a Table of Contents from multiple documents in Word, but this is a pretty handy work around.
Follow the steps below to learn how:
- Save the documents that you will be using to create your Table of Contents (TOC) to the same folder. It is not absolutely necessary to do this, but it will make things a bit less confusing for you.
- When you are ready to create your table of contents, open a new blank document and save it with a name that is intuitive for you and that will identify it as a TOC document.
- In that new document that you just saved (above), insert a Reference Document field for each document that you would like to include in your TOC as follows:
- Click the Insert tab.
- From the Quick Parts drop-down, in the Text group, select Field.
- Select RD from the Fields Name list. RD means Reference Document.
- In version 2003, Click on Insert | Field.
- In the Filename or URL control, key in the name of the first document you would like to include in your TOC.
- If the documents are in the same folder as the TOC document, check the Path is Relative To Current Doc option. Otherwise, be certain to key in the tile’s full path.
- Click OK.
- Click Enter and repeat the above process for each document you would like to include in your TOC. Reference files in the order of the content.
You can then generate your TOC in the same manner as you usually do.
- Click the References tab.
- In the Table of Contents group, click Table of Contents.
- Select an option from the gallery. In version 2003, Click on Insert | References | Index and Tables.
- If the control displays a field code instead of your TOC, click on Shift + F9 to update the field.
There is one caveat. If the documents you are using to create your TOC have just one page and you have not altered them, your TOC will show all page 1.
So when you use this technique, you should manually change the second document’s page numbering to start with page 2 and so on.
This may not be ideal, but it is a handy little work-around if you want to use multiple documents for your TOC.