How to effectively use styles to incorporate a table of contents and navigation pane in Microsoft Word

Have you ever found yourself wondering about the purpose of the big styles panel sitting on the top right of your screen in Microsoft Word? Well, it can be quite useful.

What are we talking about

This guide aims at explaining how Word's styles functionality can be used to achieve three main goals:

1. Having a consistent and harmonic layout throughout your document.
2. Creating a table of contents through the built-in automatic instrument.
3. Having the possibility to quickly navigate across your document thanks to the navigation pane.

The guide is divided into three steps which correspond to the points I have just mentioned. The final result we will obtain is the one illustrated in the following picture.

Step 1: Create your styles palette

First, we need to create a set of styles to be used in the document. For our purpose, a style can be seen as a collection of formatting rules which define graphically and hierarchically a piece of text. The graphical diversification can be obtained also by manually editing the text formatting case by case, however, setting a style has two fundamental advantages:

1. It "tells the program" how important a piece of text is, allowing Word to create a hierarchical structure of the contents.
2. It allows modifying ex-post the aspect of all the pieces of text formatted with the same style in one click. For example, if you want to change the colour of your subtitles you can just change their style rather than manually adjust them one by one.

Let's jump into the process. I find that the easiest technique is to modify the built-in styles, assuming that, as they are, they would not be used anyway. I show now how I customize the title's style.

First, select "Title" from the Style Gallery (1), and try to type something out (2) to see how it looks by default. Then, edit its formatting until you obtain a satisfying result (3). If you are looking for a reference, the parameters used for this example will be listed at the end of the article. Once you are good, select the piece of text, go back to the Style Gallery, right-click on "Title" and select "Update Title to match selection" (4).

At this point, you can see that "Title" has the same aspect of your text (1). I suggest tweaking a couple of secondary parameters as well to obtain a more pleasant result. To do this, choose "Modify" (2) in the right-click menu on "Title". You can see here some of the aspects you already edited (3). To type with fewer interruptions, choose as "Style for following paragraph" (4) the style you expect to come after the one you are currently customizing. I generally choose "Heading 1" for "Title" and "Normal" for all the others. Then, you can move to the "Format" drop-down menu (5) and adjust the spacing parameters (7) you find in the "Paragraph" section (6).

At this point, your first style is ready. Note that if you now modify "Title" from the Style Gallery, the piece of text formatted in this way will change accordingly. To apply a style, it is enough to place the cursor in a paragraph and just click on the desired one from the Style Gallery. The whole block of text will be formatted.

You can now repeat the operation for as many styles as you want. I generally go with a style for the title, three for as many levels of headings, and the one for regular text. This is what I ended up obtaining for the current example:

Again, you can find all the specifics are at the end of the article.

Step 2: Add the table of contents

Once the styles are set, you are ready to include your table of contents. The idea is that the list will be created autonomously by Word using the portions of text formatted as headings and their relative hierarchical level.

To add the table of contents, go to the "References" tab (1), then choose "Table of Contents" (2). The easiest thing you can do is to choose "Automatic Table 1" (3) and obtain immediately your table of contents (4). As you can see, it has its own title and it shows the three levels of headings following their hierarchical order. Note that what you see inside the TOC is not the style name, but the text formatted with that style: do not get fooled by the fact that the two things ended up coinciding in this example.

If you like to go customize every bit of your document as I do, you probably want to check out how to create your custom table of contents. Go back to the "Table of Contents" menu and click "Custom table of contents" (1). The option "Show levels" (2) allows you to modify the depth of your TOC. Then choose "Modify" (3) to edit the appearance of the various levels. You can adjust them individually by selecting them and choosing again "Modify" (4). If you do this, a window very similar to the one for regular styles will open (5).

Step 3: Activate the navigation pane

What's left is very simple. To activate the navigation pane, go in the "View" tab (1) and tick "Navigation Pane" (2). The bar on the left will appear (3) and if you completed Step 1 correctly it will already include all the headings of the document. This tool allows you to rapidly move across your sections simply by clicking on their names.

For my final example, I enriched a bit the structure of the document just to show a more realistic scenario.

Takeaways

All the processes and tools I described in this article become more and more useful as your documents growths in length. In particular, they will benefit stylistic consistency, the possibility of late-stage customization and your ability to navigate across the document. On top of this, you will be able to visualize the structure of your document. Keep in mind that I showed just the most basic steps and that the customization can be way deeper, go ahead and try it out yourself!

If you found this article interesting, you might want to check out my previous Microsoft Word's guide on the bibliography functionality, you can find it here.

__________________________________________________________________________

Styles from the example

In the following table, you can find the parameters I used to create the styles for the example.