You are planning to create a very long document in Microsoft Word, but the mere thought is that you will have to mess with the tool Master Document (Main document) horrifies you? In the past Master Document (Main document) was not good at damaging documents.
There is a way to do without creating a main document. You can save each section of the document in a separate file and create a separate general table of contents. It will take a bit of manual work, but it’s not hard at all. To get what we have in mind, you must use Word’s built-in heading styles in each independent section. In addition, to make things easier, we recommend that you keep all individual section files and the table of contents in the same folder.
Create a new Word document as a table of contents and give it a suitable name.
Go to the tab Insertion (Insert). In chapter Text (Text) click QuickParts (Express blocks) and select Field (Field) in the drop-down menu.
A dialog box will open Field (Field). In chapter Please choose a field (Select a field) scroll through the list Field names (Fields) and select RD, which is short for Reference Document (Related document).
In section Field properties (Field Properties) enter the name of the first Word document to be included in the table of contents. If the Word file is not in the same folder as the table of contents, carefully check that you have entered the correct full path to the desired file.
It is at this stage that it will be much easier if all the Word files that need to be included in the table of contents are in the same folder as the file with the table of contents.
If the Word file you want to include in the table of contents is in the same folder as the table of contents, check the box Path is relative to current doc (The path is set relative to the current document) in the dialog box Field (Field).
Press OK.
If you do not see the code of the inserted field in the document, go to the tab Home (Home) and click the line break character in the section Paragraph (Paragraph) to display hidden characters.
The steps just done must be repeated for each Word document that you want to include in the table of contents.
We want to insert the table of contents at the beginning of the document, before the field codes, so place your cursor in front of the first field code and press Enter… Then open the tab References (Links) and in the section Table of Contents (Table of Contents) click Table of Contents (Table of contents). Select one of the auto-assembled table of contents options.
The table of contents will be inserted at the position where the cursor was. If you only see a field code similar to codes RD, which we inserted earlier, put the cursor on this code and click Alt + F9to display the title.
You will notice that all sections of the table of contents are numbered as 1. It turns out that each document consists of only one page and the numbering of each starts from the 1st sheet, but this is not so. Here you have to manually configure. You will need to change the starting page number in each document included in the table of contents.
If there are a lot of files, then this process can be quite long. Every time you change the number of pages in any document, you will have to update the page numbering in all subsequent documents to start with the correct page number.
Open the second document included in the table of contents. If your document still doesn’t have page numbers, click the Insertion (insert) and in section Header & Footer (Headers and footers) click Page Number (Page number). From the drop-down menu, select where you want to insert the page numbers and style.
To change the starting page number, press again Page Number (Page number) and select from the drop-down menu Format Page Numbers (Page number format).
In the dialog box Page Number Format (Page number format) in the field Start at (Start at) Enter the number you want the numbering to start from. Option Start at (Start at) will turn on automatically as soon as you enter a number in the input field.
These steps to change the starting page numbering value must be repeated for each document included in the table of contents. After the changes have been made to all documents, reopen the Word file with the table of contents. Place the cursor on the table of contents, the available options will appear above. Click Update Table (Update table).
If you have added additional headings to any document included in the table of contents, the following dialog box will appear, offering one of the options: Update page numbers only (Update only page numbers) or Update entire table (Refresh Entire) which means updating the list of titles in case some have been added or removed. Select the desired option and click OK.
The page numbers will be updated to reflect any changes made to the individual documents.
This process is quite tedious if you have many individual files that need to be included in the table of contents, but this method avoids working with Master Document (Main document). It’s not a perfect solution, but it works.