But let me not go down that route. Suffice to say I am not a fan of the Word 2007 user interface.
I am, however, more appreciative of the Document Map. Well, up to a point...
The Document Map is the pane that can optionally be displayed at the left-hand edge of the editing area. It shows an tree-view of a document with headings and subheadings arranged on indented levels. It’s a bit like using Word in Outline mode but without all the body text. Or, to put it another way, it’s like a hyperlinked Table Of Contents. To move rapidly around a long document, you just click a chapter heading or a subheading in the Document Map.
I am writing a book at the moment (on programming in Ruby - the perfect Christmas present, be sure to order a copy!!!) and, having decided to publish this myself (see my recent article on ‘Print On Demand’ publishing), I have been obliged to go through the rather complex process of formatting a book of more than 400 pages in length, including adding an index and a table of contents. The indexing has been time consuming (you have to mark each index entry longhand) but straightforward; generating the table of contents, on the other hand, took only seconds to do but hours to fix...
Put bluntly, the TOC-generator screws up.
What happens is this. First I check the Document Map to see that all my heading and subheading levels are correct. Then I put my cursor into a blank page towards the front of my document. then select the Reference toolbar, Table Of Contents, Insert Table Of Contents. In a dialog, I pick a TOC style, set the number of heading ‘levels’ (4) that I want to be included and, just for good measure, click the Options button and select the option to generate the TOC from outline levels but not from styles. Then I click OK, and a few seconds later, a nicely-formatted table of contents appears in my document and I am left happy as the proverbial sand boy.
Until I reopen that document later on, that is...
Because, when I reopen it, the Document Map is screwed...
Here’s the Document Map (left) before I save the document and here it is (right) well and truly scrambled when I reopen the document...
There are headings and subheadings where headings and subheadings should not be. Often random bits of text are indented as heading levels. And, if I now regenerate the TOC, all these random bits of text are listed as chapters and topic headings. In short, the lovely well-ordered table of contents of my lovely, well-ordered 400+ page book has now been scrambled as thoroughly as two eggs with sausage, bacon and mushrooms on the side...
Grrrrr! (for the record, ‘Grrrrr!’ was not actually the word I used at the time but it will do as a substitute).
Fortunately, I take daily backups so I was able to restore the book to its pre-scrambled state in less than an hour. But that didn’t solve the problem of how to give it a table of contents without putting it through the blender.
Anyway, after wasting half an hour Googling for help (unsuccessfully), I decided to rely upon my own inventiveness. I tried using different TOC options - with and without styles, different numbers of heading levels and so on. To no effect. I tried saving to RTF and DOC format instead of to the new Word DOCX format - the same problem occurred.
Finally, in desperation and with next to no hope of success, I tried turning off the Document Map, generating the TOC, saving the file and reopening it. And to my frank astonishment, this actually did the trick!
I have had a few problems with the Document Map before but I still use it. It is just so darn’ useful when working with long documents. I still have no idea why TOC generation screws it up. All I know for sure is that it does.
As I was saying, Word is just too damn’ complicated!
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