Have you been presented with an empty Table of Content with the message that says “No table of contents entries found”? Show In such a case, you’ll be presented with a message like the one in the picture below: Or maybe you successfully inserted the Table of Content, however, some paragraphs/ headings didn’t appear. If you are getting this message, you need to learn How to Properly Insert Table of Content in Word. However, I’ll teach you how to fix this problem in this guide. If your Table of Content says “No table of contents entries found”, or does not include certain paragraphs or headings, it means one of two things: either you failed to assign proper heading styles throughout your documents or you failed to assign proper paragraph levels to your document styles. Therefore, this problem can be solved by addressing the above possible causes. This article will show you how. Fix 1: Before you insert the Table of content, first Apply Heading stylesHeading styles are related to a lot of important features in MS Word to format and manage documents. A lot of Microsoft Word’s advanced features, including Table of Contents, are based in the correct usage of the heading styles. Therefore, Word can automatically generate a Table of Content based on the heading styles you set in your document. Apply the heading styles correctly and you’ll be able to insert a trouble-free Table of Content. However, if you fail to properly apply these heading styles, word will tell you that “No table of contents entries found”. Or some of your document paragraphs/headings will not show in the TOC. To apply a heading style, follow the steps below:
See the illustration below: Use Heading1 style for main headings, Heading2 style for sub-headings, and Heading3 style for sub-sub-headings. You can also use more headings if there are more sub-headings under the main heading. Very Important: Look through your document and search for all the paragraphs/headings that aren’t showing in the TOC and apply the heading styles to each one of them. After successfully applying the heading styles throughout your document, you can now insert or update the Table of Content without encountering the “No Table of Content entries found” problem. In case you don’t know yet, to insert Table of Content in word, follow the steps below:
Automatic Table 1 inserts a label (Contents) followed by the table of content itself. And Automatic Table 2 inserts a label (Table of Contents), followed by the table of content. As soon as you click on of these options, Word will be more than glad to give you a beautiful TOC. NOTE: There’s another option called Manual Table of Content that allows you to manually fill out the entire list independently of the document content. Never use this option unless you know what you are doing. Fix 2: Assign Proper Paragraph Levels to your documentThe other factor that can cause Word to say “No table of content entries found” is that you failed to assign proper paragraph levels to your document’s styles. For instance, if you used Heading 2 styles throughout your document, and limit the paragraph levels to level 1, Word will search for only Heading1 styles to generate the Table of content. Meanwhile, there are only Heading2 styles applied throughout the document. If this happened, the TOC will say that No table of content entries found which may not be the case. To avoid this problem, always set the level of your TOC according to the heading styles used. If you used up to Heading 3 or 4 different styles, then the paragraph level too should be set to level 3 or 4 respectively. To set level styles in Word’s TOC, follow the steps below. Option 1: Set paragraph levels by editing an Existing TOC.In this option, it is assumed that you’ve already generated your Table of Content and would like to now set the paragraph levels to show all TOC entries.
This step will display the Fields dialog
At this point, you will be prompted with a dialog asking you whether you want to replace the existing Table of Content. In other words, this prompt is asking you whether you want to update the existing Table of Content with the latest settings you made.
The above steps will guide you true if you already insert your TOC and want to edit the number of paragraph levels it’ll show. |