Usable Table of Contents and Navigation Pane

Hello David,

I can see why being surprised by this was very unpleasant. Please don't shoot the messenger! I am a fellow user trying to help you use the Office that is rather than the one that should be. If you assign a rating to my response, please rate my response, rather than what Microsoft is doing to all of us! The place to give feedback to them is through the feedback mechanism under File or UserVoice.

The people who can make changes to Word seldom, if ever, read anything that is posted in this help forum.

You can use the Feedback mechanism in Office or post directly to UserVoice to let developers know what you want.

https://word.uservoice.com/forums/304924-word-for-windows-desktop-application

However, I doubt they will change this. You can navigate using the TOC and can edit that without deleting the document content. I suspect most users like the ability to rearrange document parts using the navigation pane. There is always undo while the document is still open.

The others have already provided good descriptions of the Navigation Pane.

.

If you can find a document editor with more "modern", more "user friendly" (to you) user interface, then YES, you should switch to it.

.

The Document Map renamed to Navigation Pane is an alternate display of the "Outline View".  When you are working in the Outline view with only the headings displayed, selecting a heading to move, will move all of the body text and lower level heading under it at the same time. Selecting a heading in Outline view and deleting it will delete all of the body text and lower level headings under it. Exactly like what you encountered when deleting a heading in the Navigation Pane.

.

I was able to recreate this event in Word 2010 and 2016.  Actually, I was surprised to see the delete option in the Navigation Pane. I've been using it for 15-20 years, and NEVER used the nav pane to delete headings.

.

The Nav pane and Outline view are good for jumping around in large documents, I have a 2000+ page document that I use daily.

.

The Outline view is good for promoting / demoting heading levels.

.

The Nav pane and Outline view are good for moving headings (and their associated text) around in the document.

.

The Nav Pane and Outline view are not a good way to select text for deletion. I am very careful when deleting text in Outline view.

.

I am very happy with the way the Nav pane works. It certainly is not "vaporware", I find it very functional and useful for me.  If it does not work for you, don't use it. Or more specifically, don't use the delete function in the Nav pane (I never have and never will).

.

The Navigation pane displays the headings in the document (or, to be more specific, the Navigation pane includes all paragraphs whose "Outline level" is set to something other than "Body Text"). If you want to prevent a paragraph from being displayed in that pane, apply Normal style (or some other non-heading style) to that paragraph.

A table of contents also makes use of the heading paragraphs (by default), but the two features are separate. For more information on creating a TOC, have a look at https://shaunakelly.com/word/numbering/tableofcontents.html.

Hello Charles,

Thanks for the info. I didn't think Word would set up a booby trap like the issue I just posted. I was hoping, now that is nearly 2020, that Microsoft would devise a way to make their Word doc's safer and easier to navigate. I've coded websites from the ground up. Writing HTML and CSS code is, ironically, far easier than learning the logic of Word.  Perhaps someday, Microsoft use rewrite their office applications using modern code. 

Thanks,

DC

Hi David,

The navigation pane is not only a device to jump to spots in your document, it is a summary; an outline tool.

 It is a place where you can make major changes; .

The simplest is to move a logical section of a document to another location. Moving the heading moves everything following that heading as well.

If you delete a heading in the navigation pane, it deletes everything in the document from the start of that heading to the next heading of the same level. You can also use this to move sections of the document.

If you want a heading to not appear in the navigation pane but want it to still be in the document, in the document, change the style to one that does not have an outline level. You can format it to look the same in the document if you want.

If you want to delete the heading but leave the text following the heading unchanged, delete the heading in the document body, not in the navigation pane.

Using the Navigation Pane in Word 2010 and Later 

The Navigation Pane is not a Table of Contents. It does not print. Word does create a Table of Contents from Headings very easily. Moving/deleting something in the Table of Contents does not change anything in the body of the document.

Generating a Table of Contents - Complex Documents 

This forum is a user-to-user support forum. I am a fellow user.

I hope this information helps.

Please let me know if you have any more questions or require further help.

You can ask for more help by replying to this post (Reply button below).

Regards