How to Create a Table of Contents in Microsoft Word: APA 7th Edition

so you don't have to be one of the most frustrating parts about being a college student it's those assignments that you receive from professors that say do this but then they don't teach you how to do it now lucky for you i've made in my life's work to tackle these topics and so while you may not have a professor that's great at teaching you all the things what you do have is youtube and right now you have me and so today i want to talk about how you can create apa formatted table of contents and the good news is that this actually isn't that hard to do so what do you say we get to it oh hey there me again so remember what i said i want to talk about how you can create apa formatted table of contents and the good news is that this actually isn't that hard to do that actually well here's the thing i said that three days ago and i just now finished filming this video so i wanted to pop back in because i want to make sure your expectations are set correctly for the rest of this video and here's the thing i don't necessarily consider creating the table of contents a hard task but i don't consider it either because if it's your first time creating a table of contents which if you're watching this video i'm going to assume it is you're going to need to change a good amount of the default settings that are associated with creating a table of contents the first time you do it now with that in mind i created this video in a way that runs through all of the common issues and problems that you're probably going to run into this first time through but now that we're on the same page let's go ahead and jump into my computer and get this tutorial on the way okay hello welcome everyone welcome to my computer i want to show you what the end result will look like so you understand what we're doing as we do it so this is my table of contents for my paper and i just want to point out a few things my paper is going to show up to level three section headings the reason i'm showing up to three level headings is because i believe this is what student papers will use primarily typically you don't go past three and as a rule of thumb let's say you do write a paper that has levels four and five it's up to you to include them in your table of contents or not the reason i say this is because there is flexibility in creating the table of contents and if you are writing a long paper that has a lot of intricate section headings including up to level three in your table of contents is absolutely acceptable so if you're not familiar with the table of contents the way it works is that i can click on one of these sections and it will bring you to that section in your paper so again table of contents are a great way to organize your paper when it comes to the formatting if you'll notice the phrase table of contents looks very similar to your reference page because it should mirror it in other words the word table of contents should be centered and bolded like you see it is here the formatting of your table of contents if you'll notice they all use the same font style type in size this is acceptable because the way you differentiate the different levels of headings is by indenting them inwards so if you want to take a look at market analysis this is signifying that it's a level one marketing mix which is indented inwards is signifying that it's a level two because it's a subsection of this level one and then these two sections here are demonstrating level three section headings because again they are a subsection of the section above it when it comes to the line spacing of the table i believe this uses 1.5 let's take a look here it does use 1.5 and the reason i want to show this now is because this is where you'll use your discretion as well basically you'll want to use your discretion online spacing options 1 1.5 2.0 because they're all acceptable the goal is to keep your table of contents on one page into at most but now let's go ahead and get into the fun part here is that exact same paper it does not have a table of contents so let's go ahead and build it from scratch by the way quick disclaimer i do have to say that this is a dummy paper specifically made for this video the reason i have to say this is because i have found that some students try to use my papers as a free paper for your assignment if you do that it will not work because this text again is a dummy text for this tutorial in order to build your table of contents the first thing you need to do is assign your section headings to the headings feature in microsoft word the reason for this is because the way microsoft builds a table of contents is it uses these headings that you've assigned to generate the table of contents now something to keep in mind is that assigning your headings is something you can do while you write your paper but for the sake of this demonstration i've saved it to the end so that way you can see how i do it so to start let's go back to the beginning here you're going to use the headings options from the home tab toolbar what you would do is you're going to highlight the entire heading that you would like to assign and select heading number one if you'll notice this changed the formatting of my heading the reason for this is because microsoft already has default settings built into their software so what we're going to do first is change the default settings in microsoft to reflect apa section headings this is what i meant by this process as easy but not as easy as i thought it would be it just takes a few extra steps i'm going to demonstrate how to change all three of these though so you know exactly how to do it let's start with heading number one go ahead and double click on heading one you wanna select modify from the drop down menu and then if you'll notice it pulls up a window that looks exactly like your home tab so from here we're going to change these settings to reflect level 1 apa section headings i'm going to change the font from calibri to times new roman i'm going to change the font size from 14 down to 12. since it's a level one section heading i'm going to un-italicize it i will leave it bold next i'm going to come over here to the color option and change it from blue to black then right here you may not have seen these before but these are the line spacing options so i'm going to change it from single to double spaced and then you'll want to come down here to this drop down menu that says format and select paragraph because we need to change some of these settings as well just as you would check this box for don't add space between paragraphs of the same style to set your line spacing you need to make sure it's selected here and then right here if you'll notice there's numbers in the line spacing option we need to set these back down to zero as we would for the rest of our paper so i'm going to highlight them delete and then change them down to zero once it looks like this you want to ensure it's double spaced you're going to select ok and then the last thing you'll want to check automatically update and then from here select ok so now if you'll notice microsoft automatically updated my formatting and it now reflects a level one section heading for apa formatting let's go ahead and change the formatting for the next two headings okay quick note before i move on about apa formatting i'm sure you're already aware but i want to clarify this because it may feel strange when you're building a table of contents as you know under apa 7th edition the word introduction is no longer what's supposed to be written as the first section heading it's always going to be the title of your paper the reason i'm telling you this is because after looking at all of the material there is on apa formatted table of contents everyone showed the word introduction being included as the first section and this is incorrect because again the word introduction is not something that should be written in your papers anymore so let's go ahead and repeat this process starting with heading number two again you'll want to double click select modify from the drop down menu and let's change these settings to reflect level 2 apa section headings so i'm going to change the font from calibri to times new roman i'm going to change the font size from 11 up to 12. it's already bolded so we're going to leave that let's go ahead and change the color from blue to black it's left aligned so again we're going to leave that as well coming over here to the line spacing options you want to make sure you select double space and then again you want to come down here to the drop down menu where it says format and you want to select paragraph make sure don't add space between paragraphs of the same style is checked it is so we're going to leave that we want to change down these spacing options from 16 to zero you want to change six down to zero as well it's already on double space because we select that previously so we're going to leave that go ahead and select ok make sure automatically update is selected again select ok and let's repeat this process one more time for the level three headings we're going to double click select modify we're going to change the font from calibri to times new roman we're going to change it from size 10 up to a size 12. it's bolded and italicized so we're going to leave these two settings alone we're going to change from blue up to black again you want to make sure it's double spaced to reflect apa line spacing you want to come down here from format to paragraph make sure these settings are set correctly this box is checked so we're going to leave it we want to remove this line spacing to zero double is selected great so let's hit okay make sure automatically update is checked and then select ok so now what's really nice is i can go through my paper and assign these headings to my section headings and the formatting will not change every time this is why i highly recommend to take the extra minute and change these default settings because what's nice is that microsoft will save these so when you reopen a new document those settings will automatically be there so you understand what i'm doing is i'm simply going through my paper for example this is an apa section 2 heading so i'm coming up here to the toolbar and i'm selecting heading number two i'm gonna come down one more this is a level three apa section heading i'm going to assign heading number three and as you can see the formatting stays the same now what i'm going to do is go through my paper in a sign section heading to all of my headings i will be back in a second by the way how many times did i say headings in that section okay i'm back i wanted to make a quick note as you notice i'm almost at the end of my paper something that i would just like to make a note for anyone that has this question yes you want to include your reference list in your table of contents so i'm going to set this as a level one section heading okay but now let's go ahead and go back to the top of our document the next step you want to do is insert sorry if this is making you dizzy right now it's making me dizzy okay the next thing we want to do is insert a page break because we want to make sure we have a full blank page between our title page and the start of our text the reason being as as you saw at the beginning of this video your table of contents is the first thing that should come immediately after your title page if you write an abstract this is still true no matter what your table of contents will start on page two so to insert a page break come up here to the ribbon select the insert tab from here you'll see those pages drop down menu and what you'll do is select page break now we have a full blank page between our title page and our text all right show time let's go ahead and insert our table of contents pro tip be sure your cursor is at the top of your blank page because wherever your cursor is is where your table of contents will go okay so we're going to listen to the pretty lady we're going to make sure our cursor is located at the top of our blank page in the center because that's where we want our table of contents to go so now we're going to insert our table of contents and in order to do that you need to select the references tab from the toolbar oh my goodness i don't see the references tab how can i get that on my toolbar well lucky for you i purposely did this because i know some of you will run into this problem what you want to do is select this drop down menu to customize the toolbar from here you're going to select more commands you want to make sure to check the ribbon option and then from here if you scroll down you'll notice that references is not selected so you'll select it hit save microsoft will take a second x out of this and then boom i now have the references tab which i'm going to select and here is our table of contents option so what you'll want to do is select the table of contents drop down menu now if you notice microsoft has these templates set for you off different formattings for different table of contents so this is where my dilemma came into play earlier is that microsoft does not link the headings that you set under the headings options to your table of contents so in other words the formatting does not remain consistent this is also what i meant by i found an easy way for you to set your table of contents under apa formatting so what i recommend doing is go ahead and select the first one of classic microsoft is going to populate your table of contents based off your section headings now if you notice this does not follow apa formatting don't worry because now i'm going to show you the easy way to format this okay so we're simply going to manually modify this table what you're going to do is hover over the table until you see this gray low light behind it you want to make sure your mouse is the cursor key and from here go ahead and highlight table of contents because we're going to start with the formatting of this first go back to the home tab and let's change table of contents to reflect apa formatting so let's change the font to times new roman we're going to bring it to size 12. it's already bolded we're going to leave that and let's go ahead and center table of contents in the middle and then lastly you want to change the font from blue to black all right we're halfway there the next thing you want to do is highlight the rest of the table so go ahead and select it actually wait a minute i'm glad it did that i don't know if you caught what just happened but if you'll notice my mouse was a hand not the cursor key anytime your mouse is a hand it's going to bring you to the section that you click on so if that happens to you that's all that happened it's simple you want to go back to the table make sure your mouse is the cursor key and then let's highlight actually start from the bottom sorry guys make sure your mouse is the cursor key start from the bottom so it's easy to highlight once everything is highlighted in the table let's change the font to times new roman change it to size 12. we want to unbold everything so you're simply going to click bold until everything is unbolded same thing with italicized you want to make sure everything is not italicized so click that key until everything's not italicized the font color is already black so we're going to leave it and then lastly you want to change your line spacing i already know that this table of contents works well at 1.5 so i'm going to bring it up from 1 to 1.5 and then from here you can simply click anywhere outside of the table of contents and it's set now i wanted to show you this because if you see this gray highlight behind it still that's fine it's just because you're in the table of contents options so for example if we click this first section heading it brings us down to heading number one so it works yay go back up and you can see you have a nice clean looking table of contents that looks very nice and follows apa formatting okay so your table of contents is finish go you but don't run away yet because i want to go over two common scenarios of how you're going to update your table of contents is something changes scenario one is going to be you add more text to your document therefore the page numbers change and then scenario number two is gonna be you modify the wording in one of your section headings so you need to update your table to reflect that let's do this okay so let's go over scenario number one where the page numbers change we're going to add more content to this executive summary which is going to push the market analysis down a couple of pages so let's go ahead and go down here to executive summary let's say i add a few more paragraphs i had more to say and if you'll notice the market analysis is now on page six so let's go look at our table of contents and if you'll notice the market analysis doesn't automatically update we need to tell our table of contents to update it that we made these changes so what you're going to do is click inside of the table of contents again make sure your mouse is a cursor not a hand you want to select this arrow pointing down to pull up the drop down menu select update table and then up here you want to make sure you select update page numbers only when i select ok the market analysis now reflects page six now i'm looking at my table and i notice i have a typo it says product price here and it also says product price here i know this is a mistake because this should say product placement so i want to change this what i recommend doing is go ahead and select product price here because it's going to bring you to that section heading now i'm going to delete the mistake type what should be there and then go ahead and scroll back up to your table of contents because now we need to update this as well so same thing you're going to click in your table of contents select the drop down menu this time you're going to select update table and instead of selecting page numbers you want to update the entire table from here go ahead and select ok but oh my goodness if you'll notice the entire table looks different what the heck microsoft so what just happened is that when you update the entire table microsoft changes the formatting back to what it was originally unfortunately there is no way to communicate with microsoft that you just want to update this one phrase if you'll notice it's updated it now says the right thing but we have the dilemma of our entire table being updated i wanted to show you this because this is a common situation that i find students run into so there are two things you can do here a make sure all of your section headings and formatting is good to go before you create your table of contents or simple you're just going to reformat this frustrating but again it's simple what you would do next is simply highlight the part that you want to reformat it and we're going to change the settings back to what they were times new roman size 12 we want to unbold so select bold until everything is unfolded do the same thing with the italicize option and then we want to change the line spacing back to 1.5 if you'll notice that sends our first text and our document back to where it should be and now our table is fixed if you go down here to product placement it says product placement so our table reflects exactly what our section headings say and it reflects the exact page numbers okay i just want to pop in here one last time before i roll the intended outro for this video just to check in on you because i know there was a lot of tedious work that we just went through and for you engineer types that like to understand why we just did what we did here's the thing when i initially created this video i assumed that you would be able to create default settings for both the headings and the table of content options in microsoft turns out this is not a functionality that's offered through microsoft because what they wanted to do was give their users flexibility to have variations between the formatting of your headings and your table of contents which for most people that's completely fine but for us student types where formatting is very particular and specific a template would have been nice to have but unfortunately that's just not how the cookie crumbles in this case like i said before you have those default settings for your headings so that's nice but every time you create that table of contents please know that you're just gonna have to manually update the formatting anyways let's roll the outro but the good news is that's it for today let me know what you thought if you have any questions that i didn't cover in this video feel free to ask me down below i really do my best to answer all of you guys because like i said at the beginning of this video it is frustrating when you're assigned something and you don't have direction so in all seriousness i am here for you for that reason but as always be sure to give this video a big thumbs up share it with your friends and of course subscribe for more videos like this every week and also your subscriptions really help me out so i appreciate you guys thank you

Channel: Smart Student

Views: 302,321

Keywords: ms word table of contents, table of contents, using word to create table of contents, apa formatted table of contents, APA 7th edition, how to create a table of contents, APA style table of contents, Table of contents for student papers, table of contents tutorial, build a table of contents, build a table of contents in word, creating a table of contents in word, apa format, apa format in word, table of contents APA, Table of contents apa 7th edition format, APA style 7th

Id: MLbTm5Nt5yY

Length: 22min 43sec (1363 seconds)

Published: Sun May 16 2021