Create a Table of Contents With Pages

You can insert a simple table of contents into your Pages documents. It will pick up the headings of your document and automatically update the table as you change the text in the headings or add new text which shifts the page numbers. You can style the table of contents in different ways.

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Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. On this episode let's look at creating a simple Table of Contents using Pages.
To demonstrate creating a Table of Contents I've put some sample text here in a blank Pages document. Now, the 
Table of Contents is going to automatically grab text of certain styles and use those as the entries in the Table of Contents.
So let's add some of those. For instance we'll just call them generic names like This Part and That Part and such. So I'll add these here and I'll add them throughout the document.
The next thing I want to do is I want to style these lines that are going to be used in the Table of Contents. So for this heading here I just put the cursor in there and I'm going to choose Format and I'm going to set it to one of the formats that make sense for a Table of Contents. I'm not going to use Title. I'm going to save that for the title of the entire document. I'm going to use Heading, Heading 2, and Heading 3. I'm going to change this to Heading and here is another Heading and I'm going to continue down to all the different headings that I created.
Then I'm going to do something a little different with some of them. I've created this one here called More and then I've created two subparts to that. So I'm going to call those Heading 2. You can see that is a slightly smaller font. These are supposed to be subsections of the More part. I've got three of them here.
Now I'll continue down the document. Here it goes back to a regular Heading and I've got two Heading 2's and then finally a final Heading here.
So now that I've created these sections here, and I probably would have done this while I was writing, I'm ready to create a Table of Contents.
Now keep in mind I can style these however I want. I've got Heading here but I can redefine Heading and change the style. I can also create my own. I don't have to use Heading, Heading 2, and Heading 3. I can create new styles of my own and use those in Table of Contents.
But once I have them in these I'm going to create some blank space here at the top of the document for the Table of Contents. As a matter of fact I'm going to insert here a Page Break. So now I've got this part here starting on page 2 and on page 1 it is blank. I can put the cursor here at the beginning of page 1. This is where I can insert the Table of Contents.
So I'm going to select Insert and Table of Contents. I can select for the entire document, for this current section, or until the next Table of Contents. Most of the time you are going to want to create for the document. It is going to generate it and you can see all those headings that I put in there. It puts them there and it gives me the page numbers on the right.
Now you don't mess with this. You don't edit these. You edit what is down in the document itself. So, for instance, if I were to add an exclamation point here I could go up here and I see that the exclamation point has been added to that title there. So this is just picking up what is down below there.
So now I can select it. You can see when I select in here it is selecting all the things that are using Heading and now it is selecting all the things that are using Heading 2. So it's selecting by style. Also notice on the right here I get some new sidebar stuff. I get a Table of Contents sidebar and it says which ones I'm supposed to use.
So I don't want to use Title. I'm going to use Title for the title page of the document. So I can turn that off. I can just leave the things on that I want to use in the Table of Contents. 
I can switch over to Text and what text does it allows me to style what is selected. So, for instance, I can make these, the headings, bold. I can select the subheadings and make those italics. Or I can indent them a little bit which makes sense for the Table of Contents like that.
This stuff still updates automatically. The names will pickup up from the document as I change them. The page number will update automatically as I add content and move things around. So everything here is automatic. I can put something here at the top. Now what it's doing is it has added this into the Table of Contents because it styled as Heading. I'll just change it to Title and it takes it out. So I have a Table of Contents and all that.
I could just create a new style here called Heading X, or something like that, to not be used in the Table of Contents for this. However I want to do it I can style it only so much. I can just select only this and this. There is really not too much else I can do to it. I can't alter it. I can't add notes into it here. If you want more functionality you're going to have to build the Table of Contents manually.
This is building a very fast Table of Contents that will stay updated with your document.
So there really aren't too many options besides just selecting the styles for what's inside the Table of Contents, selecting what to include, and the range. You can go into View and Show Ruler. Then while you have this selected you can see the alignment tools here. So I can, for instance, pull in these so it would make more sense actually to select the subheads here. I can move those in, for instance.

Comments: 2 Responses to “Create a Table of Contents With Pages”

Rick Conners

10 years ago

When I do this the page numbers appear in the table of contents directly after the header and don't line up in a column. How do I fix this? Also, is there a way to click on a "link" in the table of contents and jump to the correct page? What if I make the document an ePub?

Gary Rosenzweig

The header always appears at the top of a page. The TOC is content on the page. So I'm not sure what you mean there. If the TOC isn't lining up, it may be the font/style you are using is too big. Just a guess. Try making an ePub and you'll see about the jumps.

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Create a Table of Contents With Pages

Comments: 2 Responses to “Create a Table of Contents With Pages”

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