How to add and edit a table of contents in Google Docs

Learn how to quickly add a table of contents to Google Docs using Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, as our working document.

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🕔 Key Moments
00:00 | Intro
00:46 | How to add a simple table of contents
04:23 | How to create sub headings for the content table
06:09 | How to add clickable links to the table of contents
07:39 | Wrap up

✅ Links referenced in this video
Once logged into Google, Google Docs can be found at https://docs.google.com/

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🎵 Attribution
Music from the wonderful BenSound: https://www.bensound.com/royalty-free...

TRANSCRIPT

Let's start by adding a placeholder for our table of contents.
To do this, place your cursor in the document where you want to add the table of contents.
And then to add it, we simply click on Insert in the menu bar and at the very bottom of the list of options, let's move our mouse pointer to Table of contents

GOOGLE DOCS offers two alternative styles for content tables - one which shows the page numbers and one with clickable links. I'll start with the simple numbers table and we'll look at the clickable table later in this guide.

Once we choose the “With Page Numbers” option, a placeholder has been added to the document.
As no content headings have yet been identified in the document, the placeholder is currently blank but it does have a prompt that explains you can add headings by using paragraph styles.
Let’s look at how to do that now.

Let's scroll down to the first heading we want to use
And to add it to the content table, I just need to select the full title and from the menu bar I'll choose the format option and from the list I'll pick paragraph styles
This then presents a full list of heading styles numbered 1 to 6.
As a general rule Heading 1 should be the largest or most important and heading 6 will be the least important.

For this first heading I’ll mouse over the Heading 1 option and choose apply Heading 1

You’ll see that our first Heading has appeared in the document outline but even more excitingly
If I go back to our table of contents
And click on the placeholder so I see the thin grey box outline
If I then click on the update icon to the left of that box
You’ll see our first heading has been added and the page number is shown.

If I apply that paragraph style change to each of the main headings in the document and refresh
all the document headings with page numbers are shown

Now before we leave this section of the guide, lets take a look at our first heading
We can get to it by clicking on the heading name in the document outline panel

Because this was added as a Heading 1 style it has a default font size and style which you may not like or may not suit your document.
In fact, if we click through our headings you’ll see they are all this same font size and style

Let look at how to edit this to better suit our document
To do that, select any of your headings and edit it until you are happy with it
I’m going to reduce the size of mine a little bit, make it bold and change the font colour to blue.
Whilst still selecting that same heading, I’ll then click on Format and then Paragraph styles as we did before
And I’ll move my mouse over Heading 1 but I won’t click it
You’ll see two more options are shown - from those I’m going to click on ‘Update Heading 1 to match’
Now, nothing appears to happen when you do this, but if I now click up through the other page headings you’ll see each of them has been amended so that they are identical to the first one.

If we return to our table of contents and refresh that, you’ll see that has not been changed by the updates we’ve made to our headings