If you're working in a document that already has a table of contents, you'll find the table of content styles in use. To access the table of contents styles, click the Home tab, and then click the dialog launcher for the Style group to open the Styles. If you want to permanently format the table of contents, you'll have to modify the corresponding styles. Word uses a dedicated set of styles to format a table of contents. Fortunately, there's an easier solution: Modify the built-in table of contents styles. You could add direct formatting to the table of contents, but every time you update it, you'll have to reapply the format. Word doesn't use the heading styles (whether built-in or custom) applied to the document's headings to format a table of contents. The table of contents isn't blue even though the built-in heading styles are.

The table of contents will not have the same formatting as the heading styles. As a general rule, a table of contents is fairly bland. You might expect heading styles used in your Word document to persist in a table of contents, but that's not how it works while this behavior might seem odd at first, it's by design. LEARN MORE: Office 365 Consumer pricing and features Word's default table of contents The browser edition will display an existing table of contents and even let you update it, but you can't add a table of contents or modify a style. You can work with your own document or download the demonstration. I'm using Office 365 on a Windows 10 64-bit system, but you can use earlier versions of Word. I'll show you how to modify the table of contents styles-specifically, we'll add a bit of color, but you could apply a number of formats. Word uses Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on to build a table of contents however, the resulting table of contents by default is almost devoid of formatting-it's downright bland. If you're working on a document that requires a table of contents, Microsoft Word has an easy-to-implement feature based on built-in heading styles.

Word doc file format