Word 2004: Selecting the table of contents

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Microsoft
January 31st, 2005 • 5:54 am

Word has an automatic table of contents feature, which is fine if you make sure you are using the proper heading styles throughout your document and choose the correct options for the table of contents.

Still, it being Microsoft, flakiness and unpredictability are to be expected. And, as usual, the problems occur at the most fundamental level, in order to make sure that a maximum number of users will be affected and put off, so that no one actually uses the feature.

(I use it quite regularly, but I very rarely get a Word document from someone else that uses an automatic table of contents.)

Take, for example, what happens when you try to select the table of contents.

In previous versions of Word, there was this weird behaviour where any attempt to select the first paragraph (i.e. line) of the table of contents would result in Word selecting the entire table of contents.

Selecting subsequent lines would work fine. You could click in the left margin next to the table of contents to select a line, and double-click to select a paragraph. But if you tried to select the first paragraph by double-clicking in the left margin, Word would select the entire table of contents.

In Word 2004, Microsoft seems to have noticed that this behaviour was rather strange. But instead of fixing the problem, they just made it different. Now, if you attempt to select the first paragraph in an automatic table of contents by clicking in the left margin… nothing happens. Nothing gets selected.

In other words, you still can’t easily select the first paragraph in a table of contents.

Interestingly, if you triple-click in the left margin next to the first paragraph in an automatic table of contents, Word selects the entire document (which is the expected behaviour), but then if after that you click once more in the left margin, Word does finally accept to select the first paragraph in the table of contents.

How cool.


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