Create a Table of Contents (TOC) in Pages

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Create a Table of Contents (TOC) in Pages

I have been trying to create Table of Contents in Pages and tried to follow the directions on the Pages site, but it does not seem to work (with an existing document). I know it is limited to having to use the paragraph styles formatting (tried to do this- not something that I ever use), and it did not seem to work. I also called Apple Support and after speaking with 2 people (one was supposed to be a Pages expert) they basically said that Pages will not format existing documents and to email Apple to request that the Pages team add TOC functionality for existing Pages documents. Yet, the Pages website seems to suggest that existing Pages documents CAN be set to include the TOC option.

Has anyone else been able to make the TOC feature work with an existing document and if so, is there an easy way to explain how you were able to do this?

Thanks.

MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14

Posted on Mar 29, 2019 10:03 AM

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Answer 1

Best reply

VikingOSX

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Mar 29, 2019 11:52 AM in response to Scott Barrows1

Pages was not developed to be, or support an outlining functionality. For that, you want MS Word, or its free clone, LibreOffice Writer (currently 6.2.2). You will likely find more practical knowledge in this user supported Pages community than what can be provided through Apple Support, as we are using the product every day, in a variety of ways.

You will find that you can create new Paragraph styles to suit your needs, additional to those supplied by default in Pages. Then you save as a template for reuse.

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Answer 2

Mar 29, 2019 10:26 AM in response to Scott Barrows1

Using Pages 8.0, I took a pure text document with just body text. I isolated three, short sentences from their body text, and applied the Heading paragraph style to these three sentences. I placed the insertion point before the first text on the page, and chose Insert : Table of Contents : Document. Sure enough, a ToC was created on its own page prior to the main document, and those Headings were in it. So, you were mislead by Apple support.

The original content:

And the generated ToC:

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Answer 3

Mar 29, 2019 10:51 AM in response to VikingOSX

This sort of helped... thanks. The main issue that I have is applying this protocol to an extensive outline of course content that I created in an outline form. The paragraph style restrictions do not readily support this (I would like to create a TOC for an 8 page outline of course/curriculum content in a syllabus). I am used to creating a TOC in Adobe Acrobat Pro (after saving Pages documents at PDFs). To do that, it is simple" highlight a sentence in the PDF and it automatically adds to the TOC. Anyway, it seems as if Pages is limited to the paragraph style formatting requirement and is not set up for outlines or variations.

Apple Pages Support did not have an answer for outline format (or existing documents that do not use paragraph style formatting, which is all of my documents as I prefer to manually adjust font styles). Your input is helpful in that there is indeed a way to create a TOC (not all that easy to use, but good to know it can be done). I appreciate your help!

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Answer 4

Mar 29, 2019 2:08 PM in response to VikingOSX

OK, thanks. I do have MS Office 365 and can use Word, but have preferred using Pages (and Keynote). I also use a MacBook Pro and new iPad Pro, and my files sync better in the Apple environment. looks like MS Word might be a better option for the heavy lifting and formatting. As mentioned, I already use Adobe Acrobat Pro for creating TOC with PDFs created with Pages. Perhaps a future version of Pages might add a more direct way to create TOC in documents.

Will keep this community in mind, and I already sent Apple Pages developers a request to add an easier to use TOC functionality (this was suggested by the Apple Support people). I like Pages and Keynote a lot and often use them instead of Adobe Illustrator to create instructional graphics when I am in a hurry. Will create a paragraph styles template as you suggest and see what happens (that has never been part of my Pages workflow). That should be an ok temporary fix.

Thanks again!

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Create a Table of Contents (TOC) in Pages

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