How to make a table of contents WITH NUMBERS on Word (newest version)

Making a ToC, or Table of Contents, WITH NUMBERS:

First and foremost, you need to do your chapter headings. So after you have them all named and just right, with correct pagination, meaning chapter one starts on an odd number on the right hand side page, you need to go to HEADING ONE at the top of the page.

HEADING ONE refers to this in the HOME tab:

Right click "Heading 1" and click on "modify." It will open a window like this:

This is the place where you design what you want your chapter heading to look like. Centered, colors, fonts, and everything. Now go down to "format" and click on "paragraph." Here you can mess with the spacing.

Click "Okay."

You can rename heading one so you can find it.

Click "Okay."

Now we apply the "heading one" which I have renamed "hello."

This is how it looks before we apply the heading: 

Make sure your cursor is on the line with the chapter heading, and then go up to your new formatted HEADING ONE and click on it. The chapter heading format will change like magic.

The format will automatically space everything to the dimensions you want. REMINDER: If you want the chapter heading halfway down the page, then in the paragraph section where you're formatting the HEADING ONE, make sure you type in the numbers you want. Like this:

To make the heading further down the page, you type the numbers you want into the BEFORE box. For where you want your text to start after the heading, you type in the AFTER Box. If you have a number above the chapter heading, give that number its own format with how far you want it down the page. Then don't mess with the BEFORE box in HEADING ONE. The number will work as the BEFORE box. DO NOT put the number in the same HEADING ONE as your chapter heading. You can give the number the HEADING TWO if you like.

Experiment with it to see what you like. It's the only fun part of making the ToC, or table of contents.

Now go to every chapter heading you have and change it to the HEADING ONE format you just did. Don't include the numbers. Keep them separate, or they'll end up in the ToC next to the chapter heading.

Now the ToC begins.

1. Go to the REFERENCES tab

2. Go to Table of Contents, located on the far left, click on it.

3. Scroll down to "Custom Table of Contents," click on it, and you will see this:

Make sure SHOW PAGE NUMBERS and RIGHT ALIGN PAGE NUMBERS are checked. Choose the tab leader. The tab leader is shone in the PRINT PREVIEW of the screen shot. On SHOW LEVELS, which you can see in the picture, make sure it's at a one. This is for stuff like fantasy books. ToC's with a lot of levels is beyond me. So, one level. Now click "Modify." And you get a box like this:

TOC 1 is matched with HEADING ONE so just leave it as is and click "Modify" again. You'll get a box like this:

It looks familiar, doesn't it? Click FORMAT at the bottom.

This time go to NUMBERRING and you will get this:

Hover your mouse over the first two boxes. One is "right aligned" and the other is "left aligned."

Choose "right aligned." For my screen, the right aligned is the first box.

Press okay, okay, okay, all the way until your boxes are gone and you have a TOC:

Here's another example:

If you want to update the ToC in case your numbers changed, you added a new chapter and whatnot, right click on the ToC and go down to UPDATE FIELD. You will then have two options: UPDATE PAGE NUMBERS ONLY or UPDATE ENTIRE TABLE.

If your page numbers only changed, then only update the numbers. If you added new chapters, pick UPDATE THE ENTIRE TABLE.

Updating the whole table will add your new chapters.

As you can see, the first ToC had 7 chapters and this one has 10.

You can mess with the numbers on the left. Say you need to change chapter eight to a one for some unaccountable reason. Go to the number, right click on it, and you'll get a little pop up screen. Click on the numbering box arrow, go down to SET NUMBERING VALUE. Set the value to one. Click okay.

Eight has changed to a one and the numbers beneath have automatically changed, too.

Hopefully this helps. The ToC is the bane of my existence.