Word Table of Figures Problem

Question

I am a very experienced Word user but this issue has me baffled. I have inherited a Word document that needed extensive formatting updates. I deleted the original table of Figures (and Tables) since I was going to make a lot of modifications anyway. I then went through the document and made sure that all the captions (both tables and figures) were properly formatted using the styles formatting. I then went to create the table of figures and got the "No table of figures entries found" message. I have no clue as to why. Can anybody provide any thoughts?

Answer 1

By default, Word creates table of figures (etc.) based on caption labels.

If you have been using dedicated paragraph styles for your captions, you have to perform some additional steps. On the References tab, click Insert Table of Figures and, in the dialog box, click Options.

Word displays the Table of Figures Options dialog box in which you can choose the style you want to use as a basis for your table of figures (or list of tables etc.).

Answer 2

Leave the Caption style applied to all of the captions, both table and figure.

If you used the Insert Caption dialog to create the captions, each one contains a SEQ field that generates the sequence number. There are two sequences, named Figure and Table, that correspond to the Label setting in the Insert Caption dialog at the time the caption was created.

When you display field codes instead of field results (Alt+F9), the respective captions look like this:

The Table of Tables and the Table of Figures are both generated by TOC fields, and the \c switch in each field's code tells it which sequence to collect. Those codes look like this:

Answer 3

Stefan, you got me almost there. I updated the option, which was set on "Body Text" to "Caption". The only problem is that now it produces one table with both Figures and Tables listed together. How do I separate them out into two tables?

You have to create different styles for different captions and also apply those manually. Then you create a table of Figures and a table of Tables, both based on the corresponding style.

Answer 4

If you have different labels in your captions, set through the Insert Caption dialog, your separate Table of Figures and Table of Tables should be very simple. Note that these would then have separate series of numbers for your Tables and Figures. Here are screenshots of the fields for these. They all use the TOC field.

The first is a standard Table of Contents, the second a Table of Figures, and the third the Table of Tables.

When you go to Insert Table of Figures you get the following dialog, where you can pick the label you want included.

With my custom labels, I added the following three Tables of Figures from the default settings by just picking the appropriate label.

Here is what the fields looked like:

Note, the extra paragraph marks are a part of the field.

Here is the Microsoft reference page on the TOC field: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/field-codes-toc-table-of-contents-field-1f538bc4-60e6-4854-9f64-67754d78d05c

Answer 5

Charles and Stefan,

You guys have loaded me up with a lot of information that I am trying to sort through. I am not so hot on field codes so that has my head spinning- I am going to have to work through all that material to try to understand it. But in the meantime I tried something that seems to work. I just went through and started redoing the labels. Every time there was a figure or table caption, I deleted the existing on and redid it. That seems to work so I am assuming that something got corrupted in those captions.

Jay