Headings in Tables Not Showing in TOC

It is not strictly true that the entire paragraph must be formatted with a heading style in order for it to be included in the TOC. Provided the first character in the paragraph has a heading style then the TOC entry will comprise the text up to where the character style changes. If text later in the sentence is set to the heading style then it is not included. It only works if the paragraph style is a non heading style and the heading style is applied to characters. This is a method of displaying in the TOC only the first part of a long heading paragraph.

A sneaky way of displaying only the first sentence of a heading in the TOC:
1. Apply a non heading style to the whole paragraph
2. Select the first sentence up to the full stop but not including the space after the full stop.
3 Apply the heading style to the selection
4. Select the remainder of the text excluding the space after the full stop and excluding the paragraph mark at the end.
5. Apply the heading style to this selection.
6. Create the TOC.

Show the result someone else. They will go crazy trying to work how it is done.

Excellent tip, Allen.

I appreciate Word Tips and have been using the information on your site for years.

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If I found something that needed to be reformatted before I could understand it, I would reformat it myself, instead of criticizing you for not presenting it to me on a silver platter.

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Thank you.

Super helpful!

This article is too long and involved. Instead of long paragraphs, use bullet points and subheads. I cannot find any information in here! It is too much confusing information to read and a lot of it does not apply to what I am looking for.

Thanks for the tip! At least now I can stop trying and move on with this sad state of affairs in Word. :(

Very useful contribution, Ken. Thanks.

Heading styles typically have spacing before and after the paragraph and when used in a table causes the row height to increase which can upset layout. A custom style based on the heading style but with no before and after spacing will overcome this. However, the custom headings will not ordinarily show up in the TOC.

In a similar manner, a custom heading style might be needed where headings are numbered but a TOC entry is also required for unnumbered headings such as Introduction or Appendix.

To include custom heading styles in the TOC, when creating the TOC click the Options button and untick "Outline levels".

The "Outline levels" option puts a u switch in the TOC field which causes only styles with outline numbering to be selected but inbuilt heading styles will be selected even if they do not have outline numbering. A custom style even if based on an inbuilt heading style will not be selected with the u switch active unless it is actually given outline numbering.

There are a couple of other ways of including custom styles in a TOC that I won't elaborate on here. TOC generation can get complex if you stray outside of a vanilla TOC using inbuilt heading styles and it is not helped by quirks in the system.

Thanks for that Alan -- for years I have been trying to figure out why the Navigation bar won't show heading in tables ... now I know & can cross that off my mental treasure-hunt list :).