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I would like to have Word format the Table of Contents so the page number is on the same line as the first line of the entry.

For example, what Word is giving me at the moment is:

  1.     Lorem ipsum dolor sit   7
    1.1  Phasellus egestas urna 
         in tellus               7
    1.2  Quisque iaculis semper 
         nunc, id mattis eros   19

However what I would like is for the page number to be on the same line as the section number, eg:

  1.     Lorem ipsum dolor sit   7
    1.1  Phasellus egestas urna  7
         in tellus          
    1.2  Quisque iaculis semper 19
         nunc, id mattis eros   

Word uses a right aligned tab to do the formatting of the page number, so maybe there is a way to force this tab to align top or similar?

It is something that can be done in Adobe InDesign (I know Word is not a page layout program), however getting people to look at, or even use (and to pay for) InDesign for document editing is not practical. It is possible with CSS as well - but not sure if it is possible to do CSS style formatting in a Word document.

1 Answer 1

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I'm afraid I don't think that this is going to be possible, at least with an automatically generated table of contents.

It seems that the way that Microsoft Word positions the page numbers is to append a tab character and then the page number to the end of the heading text.

You can see this by "Reveal Formatting" (Shift + F1).

The Reveal Formatting pane shows details of formatting of the text where the cursor is, and has a handy "Show all formatting marks" check-box at the bottom. This shows the tab characters added to the table of contents.

Also, when you click in a Table of Contents line, it shows the Paragraph Style, e.g. TOC 2, and shows the tab settings. You can click on the blue Tabs link here, to see the tab settings for this style.

Notice the lack of any options to control vertical placement of the tab:

enter image description here

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  • +1 Always good to be reminded of "Reveal Formatting" - thanks!
    – Sabuncu
    Nov 24, 2013 at 20:38

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