The table of contents will not have the same formatting as the heading styles.įigure A shows a simple table of contents with three heading levels: Heading 1, Heading 2, and Heading 3. As a general rule, a table of contents is fairly bland. You might expect heading styles used in your Word document to persist in a table of contents, but that’s not how it works while this behavior might seem odd at first, it’s by design. LEARN MORE: Office 365 Consumer pricing and features Word’s default table of contents The browser edition will display an existing table of contents and even let you update it, but you can’t add a table of contents or modify a style.

You can work with your own document or download the demonstration. I’m using Office 365 on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use earlier versions of Word. I’ll show you how to modify the table of contents styles–specifically, we’ll add a bit of color, but you could apply a number of formats. Word uses Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on to build a table of contents however, the resulting table of contents by default is almost devoid of formatting–it’s downright bland. If you’re working on a document that requires a table of contents, Microsoft Word has an easy-to-implement feature based on built-in heading styles. Instead, learn how to modify the table's underlying styles. You can add formatting directly, but you'll have to reapply it every time you update the table. Word's table of contents, by default, has no formatting.

How to format a table of contents in a Word document

Update word table of contents format