Stupid Word question

[ffutures]

I want to create a table of contents as two columns with the text indented under subheadings, and the page numbers right-justified.

What I have at the moment is two columns with the text indented more or less as I want it, but there's a line break at the end of each line and when I set it as justified it's still ragged to the right.

I presume that the way that you're supposed to do this is to put indexing marks into the text and let Word create it automatically, and I suppose I could do that, but it'd take quite a while. Is there a way to get the same effect just by formatting the text I have?

Comments

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

YOu need to change the style of the TOC entry. Find the tab that is the page number, and change it to a right tab. The paragraph itself should be left justified.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

I forgot to mention that you do this by editing the style, not be editing each individual entry. That way when you rebuild the table of contents everything will still look OK.

But ...

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

... he's not using the TOC markers (unless Marcus is going to get them automatically from Heading 1->Heading6?)

Re: But ...

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

What I'm trying to do is paste text from an old document to a new one. The old document is a PDF which was originally created from a Word file that's apparently no longer available (though I'm hoping it'll turn up eventually), and for various reasons I've simply never worked on a Word document larger than a couple of pages or more complicated than a letter, so I'm a bit in the dark as to how to make some things work. For example, I want to put some illustrations in and have the text flow around them, is there really no way to do it except put the text in boxes?

No

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

Paste in the image, select the image, right click, pick "Format Picture" and from the tabs pick "Layout" and pick "Square" or similar for the text to flow around the picture and "in line with text" for the picture to keep moving with the text (e.g. you have a large illustrated first letter to a paragraph or an image that you want next to certain bits of text, like an icon)

Re: No

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks, worked of course. Obviously it's easy when you know how. I evidently don't, and I wouldn't say that was exactly intuitive. Bloody Microsoft!

You're welcome

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I'm currently working as a technical author (and Global Trainer) and my last job was as Documentation Manager. I know far too much about Word and such, so if there's anything you ever want to know, just ask. If I don't know how to do it, I'll enjoy finding out; and if I do know how to do it, I'll enjoy being able to pass that information on.

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

I'd be happy to take you through it step by step if you'd like.

[dungeoneer.livejournal.com]

If you highlight the text and then click the 'columns' button it should arrange the table into two columns.

As for the right-justification... highlight the table, right-click, select 'Edit Field', and then select 'TOC' from the 'Field Names' list-box and click 'Table of Contents'. There should be a check-box that says 'Right-align page numbers'.

How about

[the-magician.livejournal.com]

http://www.magician.co.uk/marcussample1.doc

Yes, the best way is to use styles. Pick a line from the table of contents (probably style "Normal"). Go to "Format>Style...", make sure "Normal" is selected and pick "New...". Give it a name e.g. "MarcusIndent" (or in my sample "IndentABit". Click on "Format v" pick "Paragraph" and then change left indent to "1cm" or whatever. You can change the tabs here as well. Go back to "Format v" and pick "Tabs..." and add a RIGHT tab at about 6.0cm. Save the style and you can then apply it to as many table of contents entries as you like.

You can do the same just from "Format>Paragraph" but Styles are better/easier to reuse and apply consistently.

I can give longer instructions if you need them.

Are you using "Format>Columns..." to generate your two columns? If not, do so.

Re: How about

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's how I'm doing it.