Controlling the Heading Levels Displayed in the Navigation Pane

Mary Anne works as a freelance editor of academic documents. Very frequently, they contain Level 3 headings as well as Levels 1 and 2. She wonders if there is any way to make the Level 3 headings display in the Navigation pane. Mary Anne opens the Navigation pane as a matter of course when working on her documents and the disappearance of Level 3 heads is a nuisance.

The easiest way to control how many heading levels are displayed in the Navigation pane is to follow these steps:

1. Display the Navigation pane as you normally would.
2. Make sure the Headings tab is displayed in the Navigation pane. (A different tab may be displayed if you previously used the Navigation pane to display the results of a Find and Replace operation.)
3. Right-click on any heading in the Navigation pane. Word displays a Context menu.
4. Choose the very last option, Show Heading Levels. Word displays a fly-out menu that lists all the heading levels you can display. (See Figure 1.)



Figure 1. You can specify which heading levels are displayed in the Navigation pane.

5. On the fly-out menu, click the lowest heading you want displayed. For instance, if you want all headings through Heading 3 displayed, click on the Show Heading 3 option. Both the fly-out menu and the Context menu disappear.

What you see in the Navigation pane should be immediately updated. If you don't see all the headings you expected, then you'll want to check to make sure that the headings are actually formatted using the necessary heading styles (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, etc.). You should note, as well, that if a heading is contained within a table, then there is a very good chance that the heading won't appear in the Navigation pane. Word "overlooks" these headings, for some reason.

WordTips is your source for cost-effective Microsoft Word training. (Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing software in the world.) This tip (13776) applies to Microsoft Word 2007, 2010, 2013, 2016, 2019, and Word in Microsoft 365.