As you probably know, Microsoft Word is the most popular word processing application in use today and you most likely have it installed on your home computer via Microsoft Office or at the office, or even both. Word can be used for a multitude of things from creating flyers, resumes and even writing books.
One common thing people do with Word is insert a table of contents for their work based on the outline levels used in their documents. One thing you might not know that Word can do is create a table of contents for images of figures within your document. This way you can have an easy reference point for figures, equations and tables with clickable links that will take you right to the image itself.
Its fairly easy to insert a table of contents for images or figures in Microsoft Word but you do have several options you may want to consider when doing so.
The first step is to add captions to your images within your document. To do so, select the first image and then go to the References tab and then to the Captions group. From here you will need to click on the Insert Caption button to begin the process.
From here you can click on the Label dropdown and choose Figure, Equation or Table. You can also click the New Label button to create a custom label if one of the default choices does not work for you. You can also change the position of the label from below the image to above the image.
By default, Word will use Figure 1 as the first label if you choose the Figure label option. You can remove the word Figure and replace it with something else but not the number after it. You can also add additional text after Figure 1.
Once you label your first image, it will show under (or above) the image itself. Then you can finish labeling all the other pictures within your document.
Once you have all your images labeled, you can then go back to the Captions group and click on Insert Table of Figures. Before doing this, be sure you have your cursor placed in the document where you would like this table of figures to be placed. You may also want to consider adding a line of text\title above it to reference what this table is meant to be used for.
You will then be presented with a preview of how your table will look and you will also have several ways to customize the table itself. You can have the page numbers shown after the image name and also change the tab leader from dots to some other character. If you leave the box checked that says Use hyperlinks instead of page numbers, Word will create clickable links that others can click on to be taken to that specific image.
Once you have your options configured, simply click the OK button to have your table of figures inserted into your document. Then other people can hold down the Ctrl key on their keyboard while clicking on the link to be taken directly to that specific image within your document. If you want to disable having to hold down the Ctrl key when clicking on links, you can follow the instructions in this video.
As you can see, it’s fairly easy to insert a table of contents for images or figures in a Microsoft Word document. If you have the need to remove all the images from a Word document, you can follow the instructions shown here.
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