how to create a clickable table of contents in word

Sorry for adding comments to an old post, but I think it may be helpful. Here's a very nice set of screencasts by Eric White that explain all the hairy details Probably won't pass a lot of virus checkers and won't work on locked-down Windows builds common in a corporate setting. If the user clicks No, the ToC title appears with no content below it and the ToC can be updated manually.Īdd the tag and then engage a Word client, by means of C# or Visual Basic against the Word Automation library, to open and save the file all the fields (including the ToC field) get updated.ĭo the same thing server-side if you have a SharePoint instance or whatever that can do it with Word Automation Services.Ĭreate an AutoOpen macro in the document that automatically runs the field update when the document is opened. The user clicks Yes and Bob's your uncle. When the document is first opened, a dialog box appears saying links need to be refreshed. Just add the tag and a few other bits to signal Word the ToC needs to be updated. Creating the actual visible content, at least if you want the page numbers included, requires the Word layout engine.

the actual visible ToC content, headings and page numbers with dotted lines connecting them.Ĭreating the element is pretty straightforward and relatively low-effort.the element that specifies the ToC placement and things like which heading levels to include.Writing a page layout engine in Python is probably not a good idea, definitely not a project I'm planning to undertake anytime soon :) Pagination is a function provided by the layout engine, a very complex piece of software built into the Word client. The key challenge is that a rendered ToC depends on pagination to know what page number to put for each heading.

How to create a clickable table of contents in word