Live: Pages Table of Contents Basics and Tricks

Hi, everyone.

This is Gary with MacMost.com, and here's another live episode.

Today, I'm going to talk about the table of contents feature in Pages.

I'll show you how to set it up, but then all these little tips and tricks as well.

So if you use Pages to create things like books or like really long reports, things like that, then you may want to use the table of contents feature.

It's actually kind of misnamed.

It should really be called the automatic table of contents feature because a lot of times I have people ask me, oh, how can I create a table of contents that has these special options and things like that stuff beyond the table of contents feature? And you could certainly create your own table of contents manually linking to, you know, every page separate, like either as a bookmark or just with the page number.

But the table of contents feature does this automatically.

Now it only works in word processing mode.

So you have to create a word processing document and then you've got the body text and then you write something.

So if you're doing something like creating, you know, a newsletter, something like that, where it's page layout mode, then table contents doesn't work because there's no body text that flows from page to page for it to look to find what contents are there.

So it has to be word processing mode.

So let's take a look here.

I've got a sample document here.

And in this sample document, I've set it up so I could use table of contents.

This is, of course, using body text.

It's a word processing document.

You can tell, number one, because you have the body text here that flows from page to page like a normal word processing document.

If I go to view, show layout, you'll see the body text box here.

And the other thing is, of course, if you go to file, you can see convert to page layout.

And that would actually change it to the other thing.

I'm gonna get rid of the body text.

So you don't wanna do that.

Even if you go here to the sidebar under document, you'll see document body is checked.

Unchecking that is the same as going to file and then convert to page layout.

So you don't wanna do that if you have got something in the body text already.

Now, I've set it up for table contents by making sure that I'm using paragraph styles here.

So notice for the body text, I'm using the body style.

And you don't have to use body style, but you can create your own custom style, of course, but the body style is the default.

So normally you would just use the body style.

And if you don't want that particular style, you would actually update it.

Like, you know, for instance, if I were to go in here and say, oh, I want this to be slightly smaller or bigger, you know, I would do this and say update.

It updates the body style.

I want to leave it here at 14 point.

So that's body style.

But these paragraphs, this one and this one, use different styles.

This one uses title, which I'm using for the title of the book.

So it's at the top here.

And this one uses headache, which typically you would use for chapter headaches.

Now, this is important because table of content looks for these styles.

And this is where it grabs the beginning of each chapter.

So typically you would have the heading style here be your paragraph where you say chapter one or chapter one, you know, colon, you know, the beginning, you know, whatever you want, or just even like a name there.

It doesn't have to be a number, of course, and use that throughout your entire document.

That not only allows you to do table of contents, but of course you could do something like, you know, change the style of this.

I can make this, for instance, red here.

And then if I look for the next time that appears, which is much further down, I will see it has changed the style for that one as well.

So see, it says chapter two there.

If I update the heading style, it updates chapter one and every other place that the heading style is used.

So chapter two, there it goes.

See, it updates it.

I'm going to undo that change there.

So I'll stick with this.

So now I've set my document up, got it ready for table of contents.

The headings, the chapter headings are all heading style and I'm not using heading style anywhere else.

So now it's pretty simple to use the automatic table of contents feature.

All I need to do is go to insert and then table of contents.

And you have two options here, document or section.

For almost all cases, you want to table contents for your whole document.

I suppose if you're creating something really big, like a textbook kind of thing, You might have sections that are individual chapters, or maybe there's five sections to your book, and you might want a table of contents for each section.

It's a pretty big project.

Most of us are just wanting to have a regular table of contents for the entire document.

So I'm going to select document here, and it's going to generate the table of contents.

So it's examining the body text, and then it is looking for all of the headings, and it finds five of them, and it takes the text from the heading.

So I've actually typed for heading one chapter space one.

I could have put a name there.

I could have put chapter one colon the beginning or whatever.

But it's taking my text from those, which happens to be either a chapter and a number.

And then to the right here, it puts the page number.

So I've got this table content.

It puts it on its own page.

So it's kind of got like a page break built in.

And now the book starts here in, you know, this second page.

I could, you know, put my cursor there beforehand.

and I could put text before.

So I could put like table of contents and I can make that some other style if I want here.

So maybe it's not so big.

And I could even put like a, you know, insert page break and have like a whole title page before this, right? So anyway, I want to do it, but this is a box.

You can see it's got a blue outline around it.

It's the table of contents and it's a special element, like a picture, like a table, like a shape, something like that.

And it has a special property.

It's different from all of those in that it can extend over multiple pages.

So if you have enough in your table of contents, it will keep going page two, page three, and all of that, pushing the text forward that's after it.

And the great thing is it will update automatically.

You don't have to do anything.

So if I go down here to chapter one and I do decide I want to change the chapter title, notice it changes it up here.

and also if I wanted to say oh let's uh let's insert a page break here so now chapter one starts on the next page uh you can see all of these numbers will should update let's see why didn't it update oh there it goes took a second to update so now it starts on all those and you notice I can click here on any of these and jump so if I'm going to jump to chapter four I can jump and it jumps to the page with chapter four on it.

So that's kind of nice and helps you navigate around.

Although I'm going to show you at the end a better way to do that if that's what you're after.

And the great thing is, is if you export this as a PDF or an EPUB, it treats this as the special element in there with links.

So exporting this as a PDF means that you can click on these numbers here and jump to those pages, which is probably what people want when viewing a PDF.

Also EPUB too.

Of course, how EPUB is interpreted depends on the EPUB reader that you're using, but I think most of them will support being able to jump to the different chapters.

So yeah, we've got this here.

So that's the basics.

Now let's go and look beyond the basics here.

I have here chapter one, and if I scroll down, you can see I've got a subheading.

So this is not heading style, but heading to style, which is a built-in style, but you can create your own.

You can create any style you want, call it whatever you want, George or Bob or whatever, and assign it there and use that for like a subheading or stuff inside of chapters.

Now, what if I want those in the table of contents? Well, I go back to the table of contents.

I click it once to select it and notice the sidebar here changes format text and also a special part of the sidebar for table of contents.

I'm going to click on that.

And there's a button here called Customize Styles.

I'm going to click on that and it will reveal all of the styles, all the paragraph styles in the document.

And it's going to show which ones are included in the table of contents.

In this case, it's heading.

In this case, there's another one I made custom that's not being used.

You can see it's great out there.

But there's heading 2.

It's not using heading 2.

Let's make it use heading 2 by checking this box.

And when I do, you could see it includes the chapter titles, the headings, and the subheadings, which are heading two.

So I can include whatever paragraph styles I want.

Now, it puts them all at the same level here, which can be kind of confusing.

You want these to be a little different.

We're going to look at formatting in a minute.

But, you know, you might have like, you know, heading A and heading B, and you just want them to be different styles.

Like he wants some to be like black text and some to be red text or something like that.

And then it would just treat them the same in the table of contents, even though the actual font styles may be different in your document.

So that's handy there.

But in this case, we want to actually have subheadings formatted differently because there's not as important as these regular headings here.

So let's take a look at that next.

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So let's go and take a look at formatting the table of contents.

So notice if I click on chapter one, it highlights all of the things that are heading style.

So all the things that are the same format, the same paragraph style, get highlighted.

If I click on subheading one, it highlights all the things that have, you know, that style, the heading two here.

I could go down to format text and I could change this to like, let's make this smaller.

If I make this smaller, you could see the subheadings are now smaller.

It doesn't change how they appear in the body here.

In the body, the subheading format, paragraph style, that's separate.

This is just the style for the table of contents.

So the document's unaffected.

It's only changing the style in here.

So I can set it to 12 point.

I could set it maybe to a really dark gray.

That would be nice.

And I could indent it.

Let's indent it slightly like that.

Maybe even indent on the right like that.

And actually, it kind of is weird how it works like that still has the same width.

So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to go to the ruler.

If you don't see the ruler, you can, you know, you show ruler like that.

And I could see here, I could drag this over and you can see how it's changing the tab stop there.

So it's like subheading one, tab four.

So I could now have a format like that, that kind of puts the subheadings indented.

It's, they're smaller, less important, and the numbers are indented as well.

And I can go over Spike.

I don't mean to click on it.

I want to click on this here.

And I could say, let's change this.

Let's make this bold like that.

So now I have a nicer table content.

And you can keep working with this to see what it is you want.

Also, page numbers, you can turn page numbers off.

So I can have the page numbers off for this if I want.

And I'm pretty sure that in a PDF, If you export the PDF, you'd still be able to click on these, but you just wouldn't have a page number there bothering you.

So there's that.

The other thing you could do with any format here is you've got the tab section here.

If it's not open, you can open it up by clicking there and you can select a tab stop.

It's just the one here going from the chapter name to the number.

And notice there's leader there.

I can click on leader and change it to something like the dots.

And now you get dots like that going across, which is a really nice effect for the tap stops there.

So that's a really cool thing to be able to do.

And you can kind of really customize this to, you know, make it be, you know, however you want.

And all sorts of other things that you can do to get these table contents to just be exactly what you want.

And I've just got heading, heading two, but you can do heading three, heading four, you know, all sorts of different things.

You can even have, you know, some of your subheadings are like, you know, of one type and some of your subheadings are of another type.

So you can have like heading two and heading three or heading two A and heading two B and then have them look the same in the text, but assign different formatting here.

So maybe one is black and one is red or one is blue and one is yellow or something like that.

Like tons of options here for dealing with the formatting inside table of contents.

separate from the formatting that is in your document for those paragraph styles.

So lots of cool stuff that you could do there.

Let me go and take a second here to see if there are any questions.

I will take a look here.

How to insert the table in numbers directly into pages.

So that's separate, of course, table contents.

but you can copy and paste a table from numbers into pages.

It puts a copy there.

There's no link between them, but you can do that.

So just give that a dry experiment.

Grab an entire table of numbers, paste it into pages, and it works.

Somebody talks about being afraid to switch from Word to Pages.

The great thing is that Pages is free.

You don't have to switch either.

You can use both.

Matter of fact, I did that for many years.

If you look me up on Amazon, or maybe you know, You know that I wrote a ton of different books on programming.

And I wrote a huge series on using the iPad that went for many years.

And guess what? All those books written in Microsoft Word.

The reason is because my publisher used Microsoft Word.

And we standardized on using Word to go back and forth and track changes and all of that.

So I used Word on my Mac, even though I used Pages for just about everything else.

You don't have to pick one or the other.

You could use both.

So use Word, continue to use Word and play around with pages and pick different projects where it's like, I think I'll do this one in pages.

You could always copy and paste or export from pages to Word if you start to feel like you're getting in too deep and you need to switch to your app that you're comfortable with.

But you can use both for a while.

It's the same with a lot of things.

People are like, oh, I like to use Chrome or Firefox.

You don't have to just pick one browser.

You can use multiple browsers.

You can use Word and pages.

And then maybe you get to like pages enough that you use Word less and less.

same thing with Excel and numbers you can use Excel for all your work stuff and then for creating lists of your books or tracking your stocks you can just start to use numbers for that you don't have to pick yeah I'm planning to do live presentations like this most Fridays if I can, got some holidays coming up but Fridays I'm going to try to do it sometimes on Thursdays because I like that I can go more in depth in these live videos so let's go now and i want to show you some cool a really cool trick now that you can do in this document here i've inserted some illustrations here's one it's photos really so i've got this photo here and i've actually uh set this up inline so if i go to format and then arrange you can see inline with text, which is really the best way to have images inside of a document.

I like to do them inline and I like to center them like this because inline means that this image here is between these two paragraphs in the body text.

If I'm creating an EPUB book, if I'm creating something I'm going to export as PDF, but I may insert pages and pages worth of stuff beforehand, I want the image to move with it.

You can, of course, have the image move with it if you do move with text and automatic and that, but I like inline with text.

It's very nice and clean unless you want some special layout.

Now, being inline with text, I've also added, instead of the default, you know, if I go to image here, there's the ability to add, let's see, where is it? Style, title and caption.

Instead of using title and caption elements, I have just put a paragraph below the image that is the title of this image and I've set it to my own style.

I've created a style here called photo title.

So I just typed, you know, photo of a bird and then I used the plus button here to make a style and I stylized it.

And now I've got photo title as a custom paragraph style.

Then below that, a caption.

The idea is this is going to be the title.

It's going to be like, you know, what type of bird this is or whatever.

And then this is going to be like a longer caption, right? But the thing with the title is.

It'd be nice to have an index of illustrations.

You see this a lot in books.

And if I go to the next image here, which I've got somewhere, I think I put like three in the sample document.

I inserted another image in line with text.

And then I put the line after it on a new line in the body text, photo title, and a photo caption.

Really just basic stuff.

And now, you know, this flows, this moves nicely with the text like that.

So now I've got styles that actually would work in a table of contents.

If I select this table of contents here, I go to table of contents and I say, yeah, show me all the photo titles.

It puts the photo titles in here in the table of contents.

I can select these and then say, oh, let's make these italic, small, and, you know, some color and indent them like that.

And maybe, you know, you get the idea that there's an illustration here, you know, that's this color and all that.

You could do that, but you could also not do that and instead have a second table of contents.

There's no rule saying you can't have more than one table of contents.

So right here, maybe I do a new page or maybe you just follow this one.

I do insert table of contents for the entire document.

And it's going to generate it.

And it's going to pick the headings.

And I'm going to go and say, now customize the styles.

I don't want the headings.

I want the photo titles.

And now I get those.

And now I could put on the line here, like list of illustrations.

And, you know, make that any thing I want like that.

And then this is now a list of illustrations.

and I could go in, you know, maybe I don't need this to be the same as the regular table content.

So I could maybe make it a little smaller or something.

I've got this nice list of illustrations that also is clickable.

I can click here and jump to any illustration I want.

So that's nice to include here.

And then the cool thing is, is you don't need to put this at the beginning, right? You can put it at the beginning, be a nice place for it.

but I'm going to select both this line and the table contents, do command X to cut it, go to the end of the document here, and then I'm going to, let's do a new page.

Let's just do page break, and I'm going to paste.

And I've got a nice list of illustrations at the end of the document, which works just as well to jump back to anything I want.

So you've got the ability to do a table contents for anything that is a unique paragraph style, you know, like in here, I'm doing photo titles.

You could have a side, like you could have like, let's say you have a, you're writing a book and you want to have these little character profiles every time you introduce a new character, right? You can have a little special paragraph that is like character profile title.

And then after that, maybe character profile body and have like three paragraphs, but every character profile title, You can then have in a special table of contents that links back to all the character profiles, you know, or if it's a textbook, links back to special, special, like glossary entries that are these special little, you know, paragraphs with a, you know, glossary title, glossary body, and all of that, and then have kind of an index.

Unfortunately, you can't do a real index, like where you select a word and say, you know, add it to the index.

That requires an extension.

I've never really explored that because I've never really done anything that required it.

But you can do at least these things where you do multiple table of contents for different things.

And it's really handy.

So that's my big tip is to use these.

Now, my last tip is a lot of times people will create a table of contents.

I'll notice this and they'll do it not because they want it in the final thing they're producing.

They want it because they want to be able to navigate in their document.

So if they have a long document here, they want to be able to go back to the first page and say, yeah, I'm going to work on chapter three today.

And they'll click here to jump to chapter three to work on the document.

You don't need to do that.

You don't need to have a table of contents at all if the table of contents is just for you to be able to navigate in your long document.

Instead, there was something introduced a few years ago in Pages called the table of contents sidebar or view.

And if you click on the sidebar button here, You can, you know, you can have your page thumbnails, right? But you can also go to table of contents sidebar.

And the table of contents sidebar is like a mini table of contents that's not part of your document that is in a sidebar.

And I could jump to any section inside here.

Let's close the format bar there.

Like that.

Now, it only lists the headings.

But guess what? If you click edit, you can say which ones you want.

I'm going to say, yeah, include heading two and include the photo titles as well.

And you can indent.

I'll indent the photo titles like this.

And you can see the heading two already got kind of its own indent.

It was kind of implied in the name there.

So now I've got this table of contents where I can jump around in my document.

This is for help you write, to help you manage your document.

If also you're distributing this as a pages document, because maybe, you know, not everybody produces a PDF or prints something.

Sometimes you have a document and it's something you pass around your organization and everybody can either collaborate on it or they just have their own copy that they could use.

They could use this table of contents sidebar here.

Now you could shrink that a bit there to get more room.

They can use this to do it.

You can even use it on document you got where the original author didn't even think to use this, right? Because the original author could have just done nothing.

And you could just turn on table of contents sidebar and then edit which one of these styles appears here and now jump around in it.

This is super handy when you're working on your document and it doesn't change your document at all.

It's just a quick way to navigate around inside your document.

So yeah, and it has a little cool insert table of, well, maybe not so cool, but insert table of contents button here at the bottom.

which you know is the same as insert table of contents so I guess they tried to make it so that you know it's just another way to do it here you could see this I believe if you do this it should take your settings here for all of these why don't we experiment live and see so if I were to say insert table of contents yep it does so it takes well and you can see containers on the next page so it's a way to kind of set up your table contents in advance with what you want and then click that button and get the same settings there so yeah that's uh that's you know my my big thing is i think for maybe a good portion of the people that use table contents they don't actually want it in the document.

They want it for them to be able to write.

And the sidebar is the better option for that.

Let me take a look here, see if there are any other questions.

Let's see, somebody talked about using ChatGPT to update a Word document and Excel.

I'm not sure what kind of hoax you've got to use ChatGPT with pages and Word, or pages and numbers, but you can use it inside of Siri, right? Siri allows you to access ChatGPT, even your own ChatGPT account.

I actually have a video I did on that.

There was another live a while ago where I talked about using AI, using Siri with AI.

And in that, I use examples of doing things in Pages.

But you also have, you know, the ability to do this.

If you, you know, when Pages was, I clicked on writing tools and then I did Compose.

And you can see Compose with ChatGPT because I've turned ChatGPT on on the settings.

And you can log into your account.

And then, you know, you could type whatever you want here.

You know, give me a list of 10 random, you know, if you want that.

And then it's going to, you know, the results will go up into it.

Oh boy, okay, there it goes.

So, yeah.

So you can see how you can use ChatGPT in pages like that.

through Siri.

So yeah, sorry, I didn't have that turned on there.

Any more questions, ask them at the MacMost forum or as a comment to this video, it'll remain up here.

And I will put a version of this video at MacMost.com where I'll, you know, improve the audio a bit and maybe trim it as well.

So I hope you've found this useful.

Thanks for watching.