Using Pages Table Of Contents Sidebar View

A new feature of Pages 8.0 is the Table Of Contents View. This is an alternative to the thumbnails view that you can use to quickly navigate while writing and editing a large document. The Table Of Contents View is a separate feature from the Table Of Contents element that you can insert in your documents, though they have some similarities.

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. So Pages version 8 for the Mac adds a few new features. One of those is the Table of Contents View. Let's take a look at how you can use it. 
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So the Table of Contents View is an alternative to the Thumbnail view for the left sidebar. It helps you navigate around in your document. It's particularly useful if you have a document that's really long and has lots of different sections and one that you're already using a Table of Contents for.
So the way to get to the Table of Contents View up is go to the View button here in the Toolbar. You may already have Pages Thumbnails turned on. Now this is an empty document so there's nothing here and you can see there's just one page. If I switch to Table of Contents View it won't show anything there either and it will give you a message about using Styles to get the Table of Contents there. So let's paste in some text. Here we've got just some text and there's still nothing here because there's no Table of Contents. This is all just body text. So if we start to add some things to it, like some styles for the headings, then we'll see things appear here in the Table of Contents.
So the first thing we're going to do is actually not going to make any change to this at all. I'm going to put the cursor in the first line, that's the title of the document, and I'm going to style it Title. You can see it doesn't add anything to the Table of Contents. You think it would and I'll show you why it doesn't in a minute. But let's go to the first heading line here. This is the first heading and I'll change it to a regular Heading. Now we see that appears there. If I go to the other lines with headings on them and I set them to the proper style for Heading you can see that it adds each one of those there. So now I have the Beginning, the Middle, and the End and you can see each one now appears in the Table of Contents.
If I click on one of these, like The End, it jumps to it. So I can easily jump to different parts of the document. This is a short document. But imagine if you had a much longer one how useful this would be. 
So why doesn't the title appear in the Table of Contents. Well, you have to define what makes up the Table of Contents. If you have ever used the regular Table of Contents feature in Pages you already know this. You know that you've defined I want Heading and Heading 2 and Heading 3 and Titles all to appear in the Table of Contents and you can turn them on and off. You do the same thing with this Table of Contents View.
So if I click the Edit button here you can see I've got check boxes next to each of the styles that are included in the Table of Contents View. You can see Title is not selected there by default. If I turn it on you can see it appears here. Now notice that these all are on the same level. You've got the Title and the three section headings here all left justified there. I can use these controls here to say I want Heading to move in one and you can see those three move in one there. I can say I want Heading 2 to move in 2. It even shows you an example here of how it looks.
So let's look at a more complex document. I've got a really long document, it's one of my ebooks, and you'll see how useful it is to have this Table of Contents View. So here you can see I've a very long Table of Contents listed on the left and it helps me jump around in the document. So I can jump to a particular area just by clicking on the item here in the Table of Contents. If I click on Edit here you can see I've got Title and Heading listed as items in the Table of Contents. I actually have some Heading 2 styles in there as well. I can click on those and you can see you can add those and I'm indenting them one more. So now I have even more detail in here.
Now the Table of Contents View is completely separate from any Table of Contents you have in your document. So here if I go back to the beginning I can see I have a regular Table of Contents inserted here. If I select it, it is its own thing. It's separate from this. I go to Format, Table of Contents, and I can customize the styles here and it's separate than this. You do, however, have this little Insert Table of Contents button at the bottom which allows you to insert a new Table of Contents anywhere using these settings. So I can just position this here saying Insert Table of Contents and it will generate it and then these styles here will match these styles here.
So if you are using a Table of Contents View to edit your document and then you want to actually include that in your document, you can use that button there as a shortcut for doing it. But you can still do it the old way by using Insert, Table of Contents, and putting it in your document just like you did before version 8 of Pages.
You can see how this is useful if you have got a large document to make it easy to get around. It's much better than using the Thumbnail view which would have one page for every thumbnail there and make it very difficult if you have say a hundred or two hundred pages to find what you want.

Comments: 4 Responses to “Using Pages Table Of Contents Sidebar View”

Robert Hutwohl

5 years ago

Great introduction to this feature. Now I am less hesitant to try it, thanks to you. I was wondering though (I can figure it out for myself) whether if you export to pdf with a ToC built in, doe the ToC work in a pdf?

Gary Rosenzweig

Robert: Yes. Give it a try and you'll see.

Douglas Brace

Thank you for this. Also, I like the new format for how you introduce yourself, the topic of the video, and change your video from yourself and your physical screen to a screen-cast/screen-recording. One thing that I did notice is that your audio seems to have more of an echo to it. I am not sure if it is because you have changed software or hardware but it is something that I noticed almost right away.

Douglas: Thanks. Yes, it is a new microphone. Not sure what is causing that audio effect, or it is just so much clearer than my previous mic. Will keep working on it.

Comments Closed.

Using Pages Table Of Contents Sidebar View

Comments: 4 Responses to “Using Pages Table Of Contents Sidebar View”

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