Ade Malsasa Akbar contact
Senior author, Open Source enthusiast.
Sunday, March 1, 2015 at 23:34

Some years ago when I was still using Microsoft Office, I didn't know there was automatic table of contents feature. I create my table of contents manually with many dots by typing them one by one. The table of content result was very ugly. But after I knew OpenOffice.org then LibreOffice, I never use such manual way again. So how to create table of contents automatically in LibreOffice? I will show you how.



1. Create the concept of your writings. It consists of title, subtitle, sub of subtitle, etc. until the end.
2. Then select your title. Or just put your cursor there. Then click on Default Style combo box, select Heading 1.
3. Select your subtitle. Or just put your cursor there. Give it Heading 2.
4. Select your child of subtitle. Give it Heading 3.
5. Consistently, you should give Heading 2 for subtitle and Heading 3 for child of subtitle. You can give Heading 4, Heading 5,  and so on for deeper subtitle, if your article has it.
6. Put your cursor at beginning of the first page.
7. Select menu Insert > Indexes and Tables > Indexes and Tables.
8. Click OK.
9. LibreOffice generates table of contents based on your headings.



Menu: Insert Index/Table



At least there are two important things you should notice here. First, your table of contents title. You can leave it default if you want it. Second, you can limit the level of table of contents. In some cases, e.g. in a book, you should limit 3 levels only for your table of contents. Then you can give Evaluate up to level value 3 here. See label number two on the picture. Its maximum value is 10.

Table of Contents Example

 

I placed my table of contents at my first page in this example document.

Print Preview of Table of Contents

 



If you change your heading configuration in each subtitle, you should update your table of contents. It is because the table is not automatically updated in every changes. Just right click on your table of contents > Update Index/Table. See picture below.



Another Table of Contents Example

This is an example of more complete table of contents. I created a document containing some heading layouts.