How to format a table of contents in OpenOffice 2.1

published Jul 16, 2008 01:09   by admin ( last modified Jul 16, 2008 01:09 )

Summary: A lot of the formatting, such as tab stops cannot be done from the normal stylesheet editor. The settings you set there will be overridden. Use the context menu item edit index/table instead. The menu item is available when you right click directly at the table of contents in your document:

See below for a guide of how to use it in Open Office.

I'ven been trying to get my table of contents to look good, and previously failed. The table of contents of my document has style sheets, called "Contents 1" and "Contents 2". However changes I make there, particularly tab stops, seem to be ignored.

It turns out that there is another place to change the formatting of the table of contents and that is in the edit index/table context menu:

.

Once selected you get to a tabbed dialog where one of the the tabs shows the following:

It contains a rather weird widget that helps you format the table of contents entry for a particular level. It is a row of cells where every second cell allows for inserting verbatim text, and every second is a place holder for entry text, page number or a tab stop.:

You can only have a page number place holder once ("#"), and the same goes for entry text ("F"). You assign a placeholder to a cell by clicking at the cell so that it looks depressed, and then click at one of the below buttons:

In the above picture two of the buttons are greyed out, beacuse theses placeholders have already been assigned to cells in the row. To get the buttons back to the active state, select the cell that contains the page number or entry ("#" or "F"), and replace it with a tab entry instead by clicking at the tab button.

For each tab entry you make, you can format it by selecting its cell, and then format its position and other things:

For each text entry or page number, you can format it with a character style sheet:

In the above screenshot I have made a BigNumber character style sheet for the page number, that together with other settings makes my table of contents look like this:

Sometimes when updating the table of contents, OpenOffice.org will lose the formatting and you will need to reapply the formatting.