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Microsoft Word (Expletive Deleted) My Document!
The Document Map, A Table Of Contents and Scrambled Eggs...29 September 2007
by Huw Collingbourne
Microsoft Word is a wonderful word processor but, by heck, it’s far, far too complicated. The latest version (2007), misguidedly tries to hide the complexity by putting lots of nice friendly-looking buttons across the top of the screen, thereby making it almost impossible for those of us who’ve used previous versions to find the functions that were previously on menus and (worst of all), stuffing a huge amount of features into a ‘Word options’ menu/dialog box thingummy which is the software equivalent of a haystack for needles.
Those blasted button bars must seem easy to use to someone, I suppose - but certainly not to me!
But let me not go down that route. Suffice to say I am not a fan of the Word 2007 user interface.
I am, however, more appreciative of the Document Map. Well, up to a point...
The Document Map is the pane that can optionally be displayed at the left-hand edge of the editing area. It shows an tree-view of a document with headings and subheadings arranged on indented levels. It’s a bit like using Word in Outline mode but without all the body text. Or, to put it another way, it’s like a hyperlinked Table Of Contents. To move rapidly around a long document, you just click a chapter heading or a subheading in the Document Map.
I am writing a book at the moment (on programming in Ruby - the perfect Christmas present, be sure to order a copy!!!) and, having decided to publish this myself (see my recent article on ‘Print On Demand’ publishing), I have been obliged to go through the rather complex process of formatting a book of more than 400 pages in length, including adding an index and a table of contents. The indexing has been time consuming (you have to mark each index entry longhand) but straightforward; generating the table of contents, on the other hand, took only seconds to do but hours to fix...
Put bluntly, the TOC-generator screws up.
What happens is this. First I check the Document Map to see that all my heading and subheading levels are correct. Then I put my cursor into a blank page towards the front of my document. then select the Reference toolbar, Table Of Contents, Insert Table Of Contents. In a dialog, I pick a TOC style, set the number of heading ‘levels’ (4) that I want to be included and, just for good measure, click the Options button and select the option to generate the TOC from outline levels but not from styles. Then I click OK, and a few seconds later, a nicely-formatted table of contents appears in my document and I am left happy as the proverbial sand boy.
Until I reopen that document later on, that is...
Because, when I reopen it, the Document Map is screwed...
Here’s the Document Map (left) before I save the document and here it is (right) well and truly scrambled when I reopen the document... There are headings and subheadings where headings and subheadings should not be. Often random bits of text are indented as heading levels. And, if I now regenerate the TOC, all these random bits of text are listed as chapters and topic headings. In short, the lovely well-ordered table of contents of my lovely, well-ordered 400+ page book has now been scrambled as thoroughly as two eggs with sausage, bacon and mushrooms on the side...
Grrrrr! (for the record, ‘Grrrrr!’ was not actually the word I used at the time but it will do as a substitute).
Fortunately, I take daily backups so I was able to restore the book to its pre-scrambled state in less than an hour. But that didn’t solve the problem of how to give it a table of contents without putting it through the blender.
Anyway, after wasting half an hour Googling for help (unsuccessfully), I decided to rely upon my own inventiveness. I tried using different TOC options - with and without styles, different numbers of heading levels and so on. To no effect. I tried saving to RTF and DOC format instead of to the new Word DOCX format - the same problem occurred.
Finally, in desperation and with next to no hope of success, I tried turning off the Document Map, generating the TOC, saving the file and reopening it. And to my frank astonishment, this actually did the trick!
I have had a few problems with the Document Map before but I still use it. It is just so darn’ useful when working with long documents. I still have no idea why TOC generation screws it up. All I know for sure is that it does.
As I was saying, Word is just too damn’ complicated!
