Tracking Down Phantom TOC Entries

Emma is updating a long document that uses multiple styles. In the TOC she uses two styles. When she updates the TOC (entire table), she gets about five extra unwanted TOC entries using the TOC 1 style and the text is the same two words. The text also appears once, correctly, using the TOC 2 style. When Emma Ctrl+Clicks on one of the unwanted TOC entries, she is taken to the page where the words supposedly are, but she cannot see them. That makes it impossible to delete them. She has also searched for the two words using Find and Replace. They are found on the offending pages, but she still can't see the text to delete it.

There are several possible reasons why this could be occurring. Perhaps the easiest way to take care of it, though, is to simply use Find and Replace (as Emma tried to do) and, when Word finds an instance of the two words, just hit the Delete key, even if you cannot see what it found.

Of course, that won't answer why it is happening, so let's look at the possible reasons.

First, it could be that the words are formatted as hidden text, and you don't have the display of hidden text turned on. The easiest way to see hidden text is to use the Show/Hide tool, on the Home tab of the ribbon. The tool looks like a backwards P (a pilcrow). Enable the tool and you'll see all sorts of non-printing characters in your document. If you do a search for the two words, you may now see them, with a small, dotted underline, which means they are formatted as hidden and not normally displayed. You can then decide about deleting them or not.

Of course, there is another reason that the words are not visible—they could be formatted as white text, or the font size of the text could be so small you can't really see it. Another very likely option is that the two words use funky formatting (hidden, white, or very small), which stops them from appearing fully in the TOC, and they are formatted with the Heading 1 style. This may take a bit of explaining...

In Word, the default heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.) are all considered linked styles. This means that if you apply them to paragraphs, they act as paragraph styles. If you apply them to characters (something less than a full paragraph), they act as character styles. If someone selected the offending two words (not the entire paragraph) and applied the Heading 1 style to those words, then they would appear in the TOC. But, if someone also formatted those words with the funky formatting (hidden, white, or very small), then a place for them would appear in the TOC, but you wouldn't be able to see the words there.

There is a very quick way to determine if any of these formatting issues are at play. Follow these steps:

1. Enable the Show/Hide tool, as described earlier.
2. Press Ctrl+Home to go to the beginning of your document. (This isn't strictly necessary, but I think it makes the process a bit easier.)
3. Press Ctrl+H. Word displays the Replace tab of the Find and Replace dialog box.
4. Choose the Find tab in the dialog box.
5. Make sure the Find What box is empty.
6. Click the More button, if it is available. Word expands the dialog box.
7. Click the No Formatting button, if it is available.
8. Click the Format button, and then choose Style from the options presented. Word displays the Find Style dialog box.
9. In the styles listed in the dialog box, choose Heading 1 Char. Make sure you choose the Heading 1 Char style, not the Heading 1 style. If you don't see a Heading 1 Char style, then you can skip all of these steps because it means you don't have any characters (less than a paragraph) to which the Heading 1 style has been applied.
10. Click OK to close the Find Style dialog box.
11. Click Find Next. Word selects the next instance in the document where the Heading 1 style has been applied to a group of words. It won't select any paragraphs where the Heading 1 style was applied to the entire paragraph.
12. Click in the document outside of the Find and Replace dialog box. This makes the document active, but the Find and Replace dialog box should still be visible (though not active). Importantly, whatever was found in step 11 should still be selected.
13. Press Ctrl+Spacebar. Word removes any formatting applied to the text. It removes the Heading 1 style from the text, any hidden attribute applied, and any white color applied. In other words, it sets the text back to whatever the specs are for the style that was applied to the paragraph as a whole.
14. Repeat steps 11 through 13 until no more instances are found.
15. Close the Find and Replace dialog box.

You may think that following fifteen steps isn't "quick," as I originally said. It actually goes fairly fast, though, once you get the hang of it. Most of the steps (1 through 10) are getting things set up, and it is steps 11 through 13 that do the real work. When you are done with the process, then you can update your TOC, and you shouldn't have any more issues with the phantom entries.

Finally, if none of the above works, then there is one other possibility—you have unresolved tracked changes within your document, and the text that has the Heading 1 style applied to it is within those changes. If you suspect this is the case, then you'll need to go through your document and resolve all of the changes using the tools on the Review tab of the ribbon. (You resolve changes by using the Next Change and Previous Change tools to select each one and then using the Accept or Reject tools to, well, accept or reject the change.) Once all the tracked changes have been resolved, you can update your TOC and you should be good to go.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (9955) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, 2021, and Word in Microsoft 365.