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CayceCayce's avatar
CayceCayce
Copper Contributor
Jan 12, 2022

stop character format in TOC

Hi..I'm not sure if/how it's possible, but I would like to have the character shading I have applied to a heading style to NOT appear also in the TOC. Is there a way to make that happen? When I added the TOC field to my draft, I noticed a check box on the dialog box that said "preserve formatting during updates." I'm not sure what it is intended to do, but I unchecked it thinking it might be an answer, but my newly generated .docx file still has the character field shading in it. Any ideas?

  • Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP's avatar
    Doug_Robbins_Word_MVP
    MVP
    Jan 13, 2022
    If you select the Table of Contents and press CTRL+SHIFT, the shading will be removed.

    Note however, if you update the entire table, the shading will re-appear and you will need to remove it again. On the other hand if you just update the page numbering in the table of contents, the shading will not re-appear.
    • CayceCayce's avatar
      CayceCayce
      Copper Contributor
      Jan 13, 2022
      Hi Doug, thanks for the suggestion. I'm not sure why, but I tried CTRL+SHIFT multiple times, and I still get the character shading in Heading 3.
      What's curious is I have paragraph shading set for Heading 1 and it doesn't appear in the TOC, so Word is ignoring the paragraph format but not the character format. Any other way to suppress the character format in the TOC from Heading 3????

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