I spent the day today working on documentation for an Access database I created for my old workplace. With 46 tables it’s not exactly a quick task, but I can type fast enough. Screen shots galore. The thing is 39 pages already.

I finally figured out how to use the automatic Table of Contents generator in Word. Now that I know, it’s a piece of cake, but determining how wasn’t exactly intuitive. Here’s how, in case this helps anyone: You’d hate to be a random visitor who had Google’d up some help on this topic, run across this site where I say that I figured out how, but don’t provide any actual information as to how, would you?

How to Create an Automatic Table of Contents in Microsoft Word: The way it works is that you need to consistently use the Heading styles to denote sections in your document. Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3 are readily available. (Make good use of styles in general, they’re helpful.) Then you go to Insert >> Reference >> Index and Tables… >> Table of Contents (set up any design settings you want) >> OK and that’s it; the TOC is inserted at the cursor. All Heading-styled text makes its way into the TOC. To recalculate, if you changed something, position the cursor within the TOC and press F9.