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How to Customize the Word Table of Contents

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This video shows how the Proposal Pack Wizard software will create the Word Table of Contents using both text headers and graphic headers using TC fields. Also shown is how to add subheaders to the table of contents and how to configure customizations to how the TOC looks and how to customize the Word Styles for the page headers used in the TOC. Also shown is how to convert graphic page headers to editable text when using graphic versions of Proposal Packs.

Proposal Pack HelpWatch this related video: How to Select Chapters for Your Document

In this video we're going to show how the Table of Contents is used in the Proposal Packs and the Wizard software. A Table of Contents is a standard Word feature and all of our templates and software are built around creating Tables of Contents that use Words features and system. However, there are some complexities and differences depending on what versions of our packs you have and we'll show all of those.

We're going to start with the Proposal Pack for Any Business. This is our plain text design theme as opposed to our graphic design themes. Now the plain text design themes will use a different system for how line items get into your Table of Contents.

So we're just going to create a project with a few pages so you can see how a stock Table of Contents will get built. So we've selected seven pages. The Table of Contents will come after the front Cover Letter and Title Page and then all body pages between the Table of Contents and the Back Page will have their titles added.

So Executive Summary, Cost Summary, Company History here put into the Table of Contents. Okay, so we've built this first test document we'll take a look at the Table of Contents. This is just one of many color schemes you can apply.

You can pick all your own colors, match your logo and so on using the Any Business style. Now you'll see the Table of Contents right here and all these chapter headers. You can see this is all selectable editable text in every chapter header.

So how Word works is for text Table of Contents any text anywhere in the document, it doesn't have to be in the header, that's in a specific Word Style that has been defined to be a Style used for the Table of Contents will get put into the Table of Contents. So for example, we can select this text, go to the Word Style screen and you'll see all of our chapter header text is in a font style we've created called Proposal Kit Page Header. So any text in the document you applied that Word Style to will get put into the Table of Contents.

This is just how Microsoft Word works. Now typically Word will default to using Heading 1 through Heading 9. Just so we have a little more control over the Table of Contents we pre–created our own header style.

You can see here if we just edit this text to Exec Summary now you'll see it didn't change here. What we have to do is right click our mouse somewhere on this Table of Contents. Right click and click Update Field then Update Entire Table.

Now Word will renumber if it needs to and reapply any text changes. Now what happens if we want to add sub headers? So that is built into how we set up the Table of Contents. So just for example, let's say we want to put these sub headers into the Table of Contents.

What we have to do is we have to apply a different Style to them because right now these sub headers are using our Proposal Kit Sub Header – which is just the same color as the main ones just smaller font type. But we want to use Heading 1 and you'll notice the font changes here a little bit just because this Heading 1 has some different settings. But we can always change Heading 1 to match whatever size, color, font type we want.

So I'm just going to apply this to these three lines with Heading 1. Now I can rebuild the Table of Contents with Update Field then Update Entire Table. You'll see the sub headers.

If we want different levels of indentation for additional levels of sub headers we can just use Heading 2, Heading 3 and so on up to Heading 9. Now this Word Table of Contents is an object in Word. We can select the entire Table of Contents with our mouse, click the Toggle Field Codes and you can see this is the actual text of the Table of Contents object with all of the variables that define how it looks.

So TOC and the /o /h /Z /T these are Words codes for how the Table of Contents is displayed and you can see here our top–level Word Style what we want pulled in. Proposal Kit Page Header is level 1 and Heading 1, 2, 3 and so on to Heading 9. So you can modify manually how you want the Table of Contents by changing this.

To get more information on this look up your Word or your Office help system on Word Table of Contents and you will find all the flags and customizations you can make. I'll just go back and toggle that and go back to the original. So that is the basics of generating a Table of Contents using our plain text design and adding sub headers.

Every time you make modifications to your document that causes page numbering to change you just come back here, right–click your mouse, click Update Field and you can just update the page numbers. Or update the entire table will also make changes to any text or titles. And that is all there is to So I'll show you some Preferences settings next on how you can configure the Wizard to set up your Table of Contents so you don't have to manually make changes to it every time.

If you click your Wizard Preferences click the Data and Display and then click the Auto Table of Contents. These settings are just replicating the same settings that you see in your Word interface. You can make changes to them in the Wizard, save them and then your Wizard will apply those settings.

This will change those flags and tags we showed you when you Toggle Field Code for the Table of Contents object. You can click the page number style, these are just the same options you have in Word that will change the look of the Table of Contents. The tab leaders like you saw dots between the chapter headers and their page numbers, you can change that.

Your TOC layout style and so on. Okay, now we're going to show you how the Table of Contents is built using one of our graphic design themes. We're just going to illustrate this with one of our design themes Nature #7.

We will go back into the same project and we're just going to rebuild this project in a different design theme. Okay, now that we've rebuilt the documents in the new design theme everything is the same except we just built it in a graphic design theme instead of a text–based theme. So you see we have the same layout of pages Executive Summary, Cost Summary, Company History but these page headers are all graphics.

We do that because not everybody is going to have the font styles we use for our graphic design themes. We don't have the licenses to just give people copies of these copyrighted font types so if we embed these in a graphic we can give you high quality page headers for these custom design themes without a significant extra cost. The only downside of this type of system is these chapter headers are in graphics and you cannot edit these easily.

We do have ways to get around that I'll show you. This is a different way of creating a Table of Contents because Word cannot pick up this text inside of a graphic. So how does that happen? If you look at all these pages Executive Summary, Cost Summary, Company History and so on.

How does Word figure out what the line items for the Table of Contents are? We actually have a hidden TC field. A TC field is a Word field that you can embed in a document with some text that word will then build its Table of Contents from and you can see these by clicking this paragraph icon on your Word toolbar. If I click that, this hidden TC field becomes visible.

You can see this is TC Cost Summary. Word is actually picking up this text in the TC field as the text that goes into its Table of Contents. If we scroll down we see Company History.

This graphic has a hidden TC field in front of it. Our Wizard builds in these TC fields as it's assembling the document. Which means if you want to change the text that's showing up in a Table of Contents you actually have to change the TC field text.

So, for example, what we did before to change Executive Summary to Exec Summary we have to change the TC field. Obviously that doesn't change the graphic header. To do that level of a change you would actually have to use a graphics program like Photoshop for example.

Create a new graphic, swap that in. So that is possible, there's a feature in the Wizard where we can create substitute graphics and have the Wizard import them in with a new name and it's all automated. That would be a different video showing you how to do that.

We can just turn off the toggling so we can go back to the normal display. Just like before if we make structural changes we want to go Update Field of the entire table and our Table of Contents gets rebuilt. And just like before, if we just highlight the entire Word object and toggle field code.

It's very similar but these flags have just been changed a little bit that tell Word to pull the information from the TC fields and then sub headers can get pulled in from any text in the document from using Heading 1 through Heading 9. So I'll show that. I'll un–toggle that.

We want to add these three lines as subheaders so if we pick Heading 1 it's actually going to line up exactly in line with the top–level header so we're going to use Heading 2 which will indent these one level. We just go and update the field of the entire table and now we have our sub headers added. I will show you one more thing here.

So what if you actually want to be able to just edit the text of these chapter headers in one of our graphic design themes? We do have one feature where we can create a custom graphic with a new name that's a little more involved and you have to put that new graphic with a certain name into the MyGraphics folder. The Wizard will then do the swap and rename everything. But we're going to show a quick and easy way to just change all the graphic headers.

If you go into the Document Styles screen, click Edit Style, go to the Graphics tab. There's a box that says Replace Page Header Graphics with Text. Just check that.

Now we'll just rebuild the project real quick. So what this will do, this will remove those graphic page headers. It will retain the logo but it will change all the graphics to text.

All right, we've regenerated this document. We'll take a look at it. You can see the chapter headers are now editable text and the logo is just a separate picture in front of the chapter headers.

So the only real thing that changed here is we've kind of lost the original design theme. But all the chapter headers are editable text. So if you really need to make changes to the chapter headers this is the way to do it.

Now there is a way you can get back the visual look if you want it exact. You will have to find and download the font type that we used for that design theme or you can use any font type you have installed on your computer. If you want to match this to your font type that you use for your company's website or your letterhead, your logo and so on.

All you have to do is modify these two font types Proposal Kit Faux Page Header and Proposal Kit Page Header. Now the Faux page header that's just the exact font type, color, font size and so on as Proposal Kit Page Header but the Faux header will not get put into the Table of Contents. We only use this on the Table of Contents page itself because we don't need the Table of Contents chapter header to actually show up in the Table of Contents.

For this Nature #7 design theme we use the font type Charlamagne. You can see now it's editable text and it visually looks just like the original design theme in the graphic and we'll make the same exact change to the Proposal Kit Faux Page Header. We'll just change it from Arial Black.

We default to Arial Black because everybody has Arial Black as a font type on their computer that's built into Microsoft Windows. But only font types you have installed separately are going to be available for you to do this with. You can see we've got back the original design theme visual look in an editable text version.

If you want the Wizard to apply that kind of customization every single time, you don't have to manually change the font type. You just go into the Wizards Preferences, go into the Data and Display tab, go to the Font Styles screen and we will modify the two font styles that we use with the Table of Contents. Proposal Kit Faux Page Header and Proposal Kit Page Header.

We just select this one and we change from default Arial Black to, in our case, Charlamagne. Only the font types you have installed on your computer are going to be in this list. So your list isn't going to be the same as what you're seeing here.

We've made the change to the font type. We can also change the color, font size, and so on. We're just going to do a simple font name change.

Same thing will go change here. Now that we have our Preferences saved we'll rebuild the document one last time. You can see how the changes get applied.

Graphics get changed to text and using our custom font type with out you having to manually make these changes to the document after it's been generated. This is just the process of making customizations to the Wizard as you need to get the documents generated how you want them with as little customization and manual editing as possible needed. Now we've regenerated it again.

Lets take a look at it. So now as we scroll down we'll see the chapter headers are all editable text. Now we can make our changes.

Regenerate and Update Field and you can see it's much easier to edit all the chapter headers and have them in a nice design theme using whatever font type you want or matching our original. So that is how you use the Table of Contents in Word and the Wizard software.

Proposal KitPublished by Proposal Kit, Inc.