Part of the joy of using Word’s tools to create your table of contents is that you can automatically update it to reflect changes to your document.

 

Let’s say we’ve decided to mark out situations and exercises in our document. We’ve marked these items out using Heading 4 styles, but they still don’t appear in the table of contents:

 

 

That’s because we haven’t told Word to update our table of contents yet. To update your table of contents, use one of these commands:

-          Click the Update TOC button on the outlining toolbar.

-          Right-click in the table of contents and click Update Field.

-          Place your cursor in the table of contents and press F9.

 

With any of those commands, you will see this dialog:

 

 

If you’ve only added text to your document, you can choose Update page numbers only to just update the page numbers in your table of contents. (This can save time if your document is very long.) If you’ve added headings, though, you’ll want to choose Update entire table.

 

Once you click OK, Word will update your table of contents and automatically show the results:

 

 

Now, our new headings appear in the table of contents.

 

Remember that if you change anything manually in the table of contents, your changes will be overwritten. So, if you notice that a title isn’t correct or you want to change its wording, you must do this from within the document if you want your changes to be saved.