If you’re on a Mac, running Word 2011, and you want to publish a book on Kindle, it is really hard to find a good tutorial on how to create a table of contents. Many of the tutorials are for Word for PC, which actually has a critical feature missing, that makes it much more tedious to do on a Mac. So here are the steps I used, in the hope that it helps another person to do the same thing.

Create the Title for the Table of Contents

1. Write the title  “Table of Contents”, without the quotes, where ever you want the table of contents to appear in your ebook.

2. Highlight the words “Table of Contents” and then click Insert, Bookmark, and type “toc” (without quotes), and click Add. This step is necessary for Kindle to recognize this location as the official table of contents and so that the “Go To” lists the table of contents in the list of choices and it works properly. You must type “toc” and nothing else in order for Kindle to work. Other eBook publishers may need this to be different.

3. Verify that the Table of Contents is indeed bookmarked by going into your Word, Preferences, View, Show Bookmarks. Once you’ve made Table of Contents a bookmark it should look like this [Table of Contents] You can upload it to Kindle without hiding the bookmarks, it will work fine.

Create the Table of Contents Text

4. Highlight all chapter titles and set them to Heading 1. Highlight all sub-chapter headings and set them to Heading 2.

5. You can type out the chapters, or copy and paste them. Or if your eBook has lots and lots of chapters and sub-chapters, use the Insert Table feature to quickly create a table of contents, but you will need to copy and paste it elsewhere and then paste it back into your eBook to use. The reason is, in the next step we’re adding hyperlinks from the table of contents to the chapter titles, but if you do this using the table of contents that’s from the insert function, it will delete the hyperlinks if you accidentally update the table. So I think it’s best to use it to generate the text, but not actually use it as the actual table of contents.

Create the Hyperlinks to the Table of Contents

6. Manually create hyperlinks to each of the chapters in the table of contents. Highlight the chaper title, insert, hyperlink, document, location, headings, pick the right chapter, then click ok, then click ok again.

Whew, that was harder than it should be. Again, if you have Word on a PC, step 6 is actually unnecessary if you select to insert your table and select the checkbox for substituting hyperlinks for page numbers. Why they left this really cool feature out of the Mac version, I don’t know.

If you found this article helpful, please take a moment to share it with your friends, it will be much appreciated. Thanks! Jill