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Microsoft Word: Use your Table of Contents to Move Entire Chapters Around
The Problem
In a Microsoft Word document, if you want to move (not copy) some text from one location in a document to another, the standard approach is to select the text, Cut (which moves it to the Clipboard), click at that other location, and then Paste.
That’s not difficult to do for a small amount of text, but what if you want to move an entire chapter containing many pages to a different place within that same document? Highlighting many pages of text can be tricky.
Here’s the good news: If you’ve already set up a Table of Contents (TOC), Word already has a built-in method that doesn’t involve careful multi-page selection and Cut-and-Paste.
What’s involved in making a Table of Contents
Creating and maintaining a TOC for your document involves 3 important steps.
However, in order to use this move-entire-chapter technique, technically you only have to do the first step below.
- Go through your document and, for each title or heading that deserves to be listed in the TOC, click in that paragraph and change its Paragraph Style to one of the special built-in styles “Heading 1,” “Heading 2,” etc., depending on that title’s “level.” For example, you’d use “Heading 1” for a chapter title, “Heading 2” for a subchapter, etc.
- Near the beginning of your document, Insert a TOC Field, which will expand into a list of those specially-marked paragraphs and their page numbers. If you click a page number in the TOC, Word will leap to that page and place your insertion point at the start of that heading.
- After editing your document, you would then Update your TOC, which makes it re-generate that list of headings and page numbers.
Exactly how you perform each of these steps will depend on which version of Word you’re using.
How to move entire chapters (or subchapters) without using Cut and Paste
My research indicates that this feature is available in:
- Word for Windows 2010 or later
- Word for Mac 2016 or later; while the Navigation Pane in version 2011 displays a list of the chapters, you can’t click-and-drag to reorder them
Here is a short summary of the steps:
- Save your document to preserve any changes that you’ve made so far.
- Make a backup copy of your document in case something goes wrong.
- View->Navigation Pane - It will appear as a column on the left in your document window.
- Click “Headings” in the Navigation Pane if it’s not already selected.
- Click-and-drag a Heading in the list on the left to move it within the document; for example, you could drag Chapter 20 and drop it above Chapter 2.
- When you’re done rearranging, hide the Navigation Pane.
- Go back to your TOC and Update it.
- Save your changes.
If you’re using an earlier version of Word that doesn’t have this ability in the Navigation Pane, you would use the Outline View instead:
- Save your document.
- Make a backup copy of your document in case something goes wrong.
- Note which View you’re currently using; the default is Print Layout (Page Layout in older versions).
- Change the View to Outline.
- Click-and-drag to reorder.
- When you’re done rearranging, change the View back to the one you normally use.
- Go back to your TOC and Update it.
- Save your changes.
Note that these techniques are only useful if you want to move an entire chapter or subchapter. If you only want to move a portion of a chapter, then you’ll have to use a different approach.
Where to go from here
As always, if any of my advice seems too difficult to follow, I recommend that you find someone you know and trust who can help you.
In the searches below, replace “X” with the version of Word you’re using, e.g., Windows or Mac, 2010 or 2016, etc.
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