Word: Pictures in a table of contents

Recently a few people have asked me to fix their auto-generated table of contents (TOC) in Word. Somehow they’ve ended up with a picture in there and they don’t know how or why, and it keeps coming back when they regenerate the TOC.

This one’s easy to fix—once you know why it occurs.

The default behaviour of Word is to use Heading styles to create the TOC. The paragraph the picture is in has a Heading style applied to it.

1. Find the picture in the body of the document.
2. Replace the Heading style with a standard paragraph style.
3. Regenerate the TOC and the picture should be gone forever!

[This article was first published in the March 2005 CyberText Newsletter]

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Get crisp, clean graphics from a Word document

Here’s a tip when you need to extract GOOD graphics out of a Word document: Save the document as HTML pages.

You get the text, which you can ignore, and a folder of images in both PNG and JPG formats. If they’re screenshots and the like, the JPGs are invariably scruffy (jaggy, pixellated etc.), but the PNGs are crisp and clear. Quicker than capturing – even with SnagIt – and you get the images at the full size they were saved in the document, not Word’s resized version to fit the page.

Update: 27 May 2008: Save as HTML (File > Save as > Web Page (*.htm, *.html)), not filtered HTML (File > Save as > Web Page, Filtered (*.htm, *.html)). Filtered HTML only gives you GIFs and JPGs; you need ’straight’ HTML to get PNGs.

Update: 21 August 2008: This behavior seems to be the same in Word 2007. Saving as Filtered HTML only results in JPGs, whereas saving as HTML gives you PNGs as well.

Has this tip helped you? saved you time? saved your skin? You can thank me by clicking on the cup and buying me a coffee. (An E-Junkie shopping cart page will open where you can pay for my coffee via PayPal.)