How to Add Table of Contents in LibreOffice Writer

This beginner’s guide will help you to add a basic Table of Contents in the Writer document.

Table of Contents is a necessary index for every user when dealing with long documents, book drafts etc. The table of contents is an index which gives users easy access to any location in the document.

In this guide, we will create a simple table of contents (TOC) with three headings and some sub-headings.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Chapter 2
Description
How to create

Chapter 3
Summary

Here’s how you can do it.

Steps to Add Table of Contents in LibreOffice

• Open the document where you want to add a table of contents. Consider the document below, for example.

• You must add the headings and subheadings with style to make them appear in the table of contents.
• Select the heading which would be an item in your index content. Then, from the toolbar, select Heading 1.

• If you are using Tabbed UI (ribbon), you can find the heading options under the Home tab, as shown below.

• Repeat the steps for all top-level headings.
• For the subheading, select the corresponding text and apply style Heading 2.
• Repeat the steps for all top-level headings.

• Once you have applied all the heading styles, put the cursor at the beginning of the document to create a table of contents.
• From the menu, select Insert > Table of contents and Index > Table of contents, Index or Bibliography.
• If you are using Tabbed UI (Ribbon), you can find it under “References” tab (See below).

• In the next window, Press OK.
• You can now see the table of contents added at the beginning of your document. You can CTRL+Click to follow the sections/headings from the table of contents.

• This is how you can add a basic table of contents.

Numbered List in the Table of Contents

It is often wise to add a numbered list to the table of contents to properly explain the hierarchy. For example –

1. Chapter 1
1.1 Introduction

2. Chapter 2
2.1 Description
2.2 How to create

3. Chapter 3
3.1 Summary

This is how you can do it.

• Select the texts where you have added Headings. From the toolbar, select Numbered Lists. Choose your favourite numbered list.

• Now, click on a subheading (having style heading 2) and select Numbered List again from the toolbar. You can see the subheading is labelled with a dot, and a sublist is created.
• This way, you can keep repeating the steps for all the headings and subheadings.

Add New Headings in the Table of Contents

To add new headings, you can just apply the Heading 1 or Heading 2 etc., to any text, and it would appear in the table of contents. If you want the headings to be numbered list, you can still apply the same.

Update or Modify an existing Table of Contents

• Once new headings are added, to update the table of contents, follow the below steps.
• Right-click on top of the table of contents and click Update Index.

• The entire table of contents would be updated with the headings from the entire document.
• If you would like to edit the table of contents, its styles, click on the Edit index in the right-click context menu.
• To delete the table of contents, click on the Delete Index in the above context menu.

Conclusion

This is the easy way to apply the table of contents in a Writer document. Drop a comment below if this article helped you or if you have any questions.