Word - Triage 3 Tacky TOCs Let's say you're having a really lucky day, and the document you inherited looks clean with Format Markers turned on. You scan through in Normal View and the style-list shows good structure and assignment - maybe just a few Normal styles, but not bad. What could be wrong with a nice-looking doc like this? A tacky TOC, badly formed Table of Contents - that's what could be wrong. Quick TOC check #1 - view the TOC in Normal View, and take note of the style assignments. The list should look like: TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 2, TOC 3, TOC 3, TOC 2, TOC 2, TOC 1, TOC 2, TOC 2, etc. Anything else, and the TOC was hand-carved, not generated automatically. This is a bad sign. Quick TOC check #2 - go to the Table of Contents, and click on an entry, any entry. You should immediately jump to that entry's page in the document, because Word TOCs are hyperlinked. To get back to the TOC, click on the left-arrow Back button at the left edge of your toolbar, or use the scrollbar. No jump? No hyperlinks? Bad sign.... Quick TOC check #3 - right-click on anything in the TOC. The context menu (popup) should have a section containing "Update Field", "Toggle Field Codes". That means the TOC is a generated field, not hand-carved. This is a good sign. If a document has a TOC, it should be a generated TOC. A hand-carved TOC is a desperately serious flaw. It means someone typed or copy-pasted every TOC entry manually from its location in the document into the TOC. Then that someone tabbed over to the right edge of the page and typed the entry's current page number. If a page gets added near the front of the document, that someone has to go back and review the new current location of each page, and type the new location into the TOC. This is not a good use of resources. While it's possible that a hand-carved TOC sits in an otherwise well-formed document and the author simply didn't know how to generate a TOC automatically, it's unlikely. That would be like a deer with horns instead of antlers. A tacky TOC is a sure sign of trouble. What's the big deal about auto-generated TOCs? They're part of the package with Heading Styles, the next topic. For more info about TOCs see Word's Help - Contents > Working with Long Documents > Creating Indexes, Tables of Contents, and Other Tables > Tables of Contents.