Styles for Dissertation Table of Contents

Making of an effective table of contents starts with identifying headings and designating styles to those headings.

Using heading styles to format your headings can not only save a lot of time by automatically converting their formatting to the defined style, but also serves as a tool to identify the heading and its level, to be used later when creating a thesis table of contents.

Each heading style already has predefined sizes, fonts, colors, spacing, etc. but can be changed as per the user’s requirements. This also helps once all headings have been created and you intend to change the style of a certain type of heading.

All that is needed to change the style of a type of a heading, and it is automatically reflected on all headings that use the style.

Below is how the styles menu looks like;

In order to allocate a style to a heading, first select a heading, and then click on one of the styles in the ‘Styles’ menu. Doing so converts the selected heading to the style that is selected in the Styles menu.

You can style similar level of headings in the same style by selecting each heading and then clicking on the style in the Style menu.

It is important to note that it greatly helps and saves time if you allocate styles to heading in a systematic manner, i.e. you allocate the style as you write.

The styles are not limited to headings only, but can be used for paragraphs as well, by selecting the whole paragraph and applying a style to it.

Changing Appearance of Pre-Defined Styles

In order to change the appearance of a style to one that suits you,

You would need to right click on one of the styles to open a drop down menu.

Select ‘Modify’ from the menu. This would display a window with various formatting and appearance options. You can select the most appropriate ones and click ‘OK’. The change that you made to the style reflects on all headings or paragraphs that use this style.

There are further changes that can be made to headings but using styles is an important step for creating table of contents for thesis. Once this step is completed, you can continue to creating a thesis table of contents.

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