Export Word Table of Contents into an excel using the custom headings (ToC) as headers of columns.

Question

I have a word document that I use to take notes for school. I use custom headings to build a table of contents. Which is really useful when studying inside the word document. However! I want to take that table of contents and "export"(?) it over to excel. Using the custom headers as headers of every column in excel. Is that possible?

Im thinking of it like a "reverse" mail merge maybe? Using the custom headings as the mail merge fields? Something like that.

Basically transfer my table of contents into an excel. Where the headers of the columns are the custom headings (in the styles pane) I used to build the ToC.

Answer 1

There is no equivalent to a Table of Contents in Excel. So you can make something that looks like a TOC, but it isn't going to work like one. No automatic style-based table, no automatic hyperlinks, no automatic page numbers. Excel workbooks are rarely long enough that a TOC would make sense. That program already has a named tab interface that accomplishes some of the same things. How about if you back up a little and tell us what problem you're trying to solve or what job you're trying to get done?

Answer 2

Is it possible? Yes.

Is it something built into Word? No. Excel? No.

The simple way would be to copy and paste your headings from Word to your Excel column first row. Otherwise someone is going to have to write a program to do what you want.

Answer 3

Of course!

In my word document, I am using the ToC to function as a sort of "outline" or summary of the key points of every class. It is very easy to do this because I can use the custom headings to mark pieces of notes as "important points", "date", "general topic", "specific topic", etc. Then when I update the ToC, I can see the main ideas in one place. However, I'd like to take that information and put it into excel so I can use the filter feature to see all of the "marked" text in a specific group. For example, all of the things that have the "date" custom heading would show up in one column in excel giving me a bunch of dates in that column. Then I could filter for specific dates, etc.

Answer 4

John has pretty much explained the issue but if you simply want a static copy of the TOC just copy it in Word the paste into the Excel sheet & adjust Column Widths & format as necessary. For example, this:

can result in this:

Answer 5

Something like this.

Turns into this:

*small mistake: A4 should read "....Heading 1"