Creating Numbered Table Of Contents Chapters In Mac Pages

Hi this is Gary with MacMost.com. Today I'm going to show you how to have automatically numbered chapters in a Table of Contents in Pages.

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So it's fairly easy to create a Table of Contents in Pages. When you do you can easily add and remove chapter titles as needed. But if you also want to have those chapters numbered most people just manually number them. This could be a problem if you have a bunch of chapters and you suddenly want to insert one in the middle. Then you have to renumber all of the chapters after that. However there is a technique you can use to have the chapters automatically numbered. This way inserting a new one is no problem.

Here is an example book. It's just a bunch of chapter titles and a few paragraphs in-between each one. Now the idea is I want to create a Table of Contents with all of the chapter titles and I want them to be numbered. Creating a Table of Contents is pretty easy. I'm going to put the cursor here at the beginning. I'm going to do Insert, Table of Contents for the entire Document. That creates a page here at the start with my Table of Contents and you could see each heading is there. The reason these lines were chosen for the Table of Contents is if I look in the text and I select one of these lines you could see it's set to Heading style. Each one of these is Heading style. 

Then if I go to Table of Contents and I select that I can click on Table of Contents on the right sidebar, look at Customized styles and see that the Heading style is the one being used to create the Table of Contents. Now the goal is to have these numbered one, two, three, etc. But not just to have them numbered but to allow me to insert one in the middle and it will automatically renumber everything. After all I could simply go and put one period at the beginning here. If I look here I can see that there. By manually numbering them I'm in trouble if I insert a chapter in the middle and then I have to go and renumber all the chapters after that. 

Now when you think of numbering you should be thinking of numbered lists which is exactly what we're going to be using here. So I'm going to go here in the Format sidebar and go all the way to the bottom. There's Bullets & Lists. I'm going to expand on that. I'm going to change the Bullets from No Bullets to Numbers. Since I only have the one line selected that's where my cursor is and it just changes that one line. You can see it's set to Numbers. I can set the type of numbers. So I can do Roman Numerals or something like that if I want. I'm just going to stick with the standard numbers here and it's just this one item numbered number one.

Now if I were to do that for each one of these it would just number each one as number one since it's not a continuous list. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to click here for Bullets & Lists styles. What I'm going to do is create a new one. I'm going to hit the Plus button here and I'm going to call this one Chapter Numbers. I'm also going to assign a keyboard shortcut to it. Clicking here I can assign the shortcut F1 to it. 

So now I can go down to the next Heading here. Select that. When I press F1 you can see that also becomes the chapter numbers style for Bullets & Lists. But that one starts as one as well. However if you look down here you could see I could choose Start From and a number. Or Continue From Previous. If I select Continue From Previous it will pick up the count from the last time that style was used. So I get number 2. So if I go down to here I do F1 and then I select Continue From Previous and you can see that's number 3. I'll just do that for each one of those. Now I have all the chapters numbered 1-7. If I look at the Table of Contents those numbers carry on into the Table of Contents.

Now that might seem like a little bit of work to do it for each chapter but if you start off by doing that at the beginning then it's no problem. For instance I can add a new chapter here and all I need to do is change that to the Heading style, hit F1 and then select continue from previous. This works with Copy and Paste. So if I copied this chapter title here and pasted it you could see not only did it pick up the Heading style and the Bullet & List chapter number style but it also picked up Continue From Previous making it even easier.

Now the cool thing is that if I decide to add a chapter in the middle, like maybe right here, it'll automatically renumber things. So here's the name of the chapter. I'll make it a Heading and I will hit F1 to make that a chapter number Bullets & Lists style. Then I'll click on Continue From Previous. You could see now all of the chapter numbers after it have been pushed down by one. 

Another advantage to doing it this way is I can change the Style really easily. Since these are all set to the Chapter Number style I can update it. Let me take this first one here and I will change it from this type of numbering to use Roman Numerals. Then I can go to the Styles here and hit the Update button and you could see they all update now to using Roman Numerals. I could look here at the Table of Contents and see that all has been updated there as well.

There are some limits to this technique. Most notably you can't have a custom numbering scheme. So, for instance, if you wanted to say have chapter space one colon and then the name of the chapter you can't do that. The number has got to be first and you have to use the period or a right parenthesis after the number. It would also be nice to have a way just to have a way to have chapter names like chapter one, chapter two, chapter three, etc. and not have to have titles for each one. You can do that with this technique now in using just a blank line making that numbered and then you can have just like the number one followed by a period. But in most cases you want the number by itself or you want the word chapter before it. In that case you still have to do everything manually.