The Skinny on Pages' TOC

Pages is one of those apps that really filled a void in my world. Word was slow and cumbersome (and pre-version 2008 for Mac, not very pretty) and AppleWorks never transitioned into the vibrant OS X Cocoa world.

While I know the application pretty darn well by this point, I’m always excited when I learn something new. Case in point: the automatically-populating Table of Contents feature.

If you’re writing a paper that needs a Table of Contents, there’s no reason to do it manually. When done correctly, the TOC will display your Heading styles and apply a page number to them, and then update on the fly while you’re making changes. If you haven’t used it before, you should—but there are some initially perplexing things about the formatting, so here are some tips:

• Heading styles are found in the Styles Drawer, the window that appears to the right or left of the document you’re working on. (Note: if you don’t see it, click the View icon at the top of your document and select Show Styles Drawer.)
• Each page of your document should be its own Section; select Section Break in the Insert menu to break out each page.
• Once you have broken out your pages into Sections, your TOC should show each Heading (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc.) with an assigned page.
• To edit what is shown in the TOC, click on the Documents section of the Inspector, and select TOC. There, you can check or uncheck any number of options to show.
• The individual Section preferences are found in the Layout section of the Inspector. This is where you can designate your pagination.
• You can control your pagination by selecting either “Continue from previous section” or “Start at: [put your page number here]” under Section in the Layout part of the Inspector.
• Important: If you want to have your document start at ‘1’ after the TOC, you need to select “Continue…” on both the cover page (if you have one) and the TOC and select “Start at: 1” on the first actual page of your document.
• The font, font size, line spacing, etc. are all editable in the TOC using the Text section of the Inspector. And even though they are linked, you can make your page numbers a different size than the rest of the text in the TOC.

Anyone else out there a Pages fangirl or fanboy? Send us your comments!