Often, when you work with Excel, you tend to use a number of worksheets so that data related to a particular project stays in one workbook. Soon, you find yourself having ten to fifteen worksheets and struggling to find data from among those several sheets. One quick way to solve this problem is to create a table of contents using hyperlinks. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to create a table of contents in Excel 2010.
How to Create a Table of Contents in Excel 2010
To create a table of contents in Excel:
1. If your Excel sheet already contains data, insert a fresh sheet. Right-click the first Sheet tab in your workbook and choose Insert. In the Insert dialog box, select Worksheet and click OK. A new sheet titled Sheet 1 is inserted.
2. Press Ctrl+K. The Insert Hyperlink dialog box is displayed.
3. In the dialog box, in the Link to section, select Place in this Document.
4. In the list box that displays the text Cell Reference, select the worksheet you want to link to.
5. At the top of the dialog box, in the Text To Display text box, observe that the sheet name is displayed along with a reference to cell A1. Delete characters before and after the page name so that only the sheet name shows up in the Table of Contents.
6. Click OK.
7. In Sheet 1, place the cursor in cell A2, and repeat steps 2 to 5 to add a hyperlink for the next sheet. Continue this for each of the remaining sheets.
8. Select the View tab. In the Show group, uncheck the Gridlines and Headings checkboxes to turn them off.
9. You can also remove the underline from the hyperlinks. Select Column A and then, on the Home tab, in the Font group, click Underline.
That’s it. You now have a quick reference sheet a.k.a a table of contents to help you quickly navigate to any sheet you want to.
There’s also a quick shortcut to navigate to various sheets if you don’t want to create a table of contents. Just right-click the scroll buttons to the left of the Sheet tab and you can select the worksheet you want to navigate to.
I hope this tutorial has helped you make your navigation quicker in Excel 2010.
TOC (Table of Contents) in Word is just as easy and can be accomplished in quick time, provided you have added the right styles when preparing your document. Styles refer to the HTML Styles such as Heading 1, Heading 2, and so on up to Heading 9, that you find on the Home tab on the Word 2010 Ribbon. In this post, let’s take a look at how to create Table of Contents in Word.
How to Create Table of Contents in Word
1. Apply Heading to your documents content. Select the text you want to convert to a heading. On the Home tab, in the Styles group, in the Styles gallery, select a Heading Style.
2. Once the appropriate heading styles are applied throughout the document, head over to the beginning of the document. You can press Ctrl+Home to get there.
3. Select the References tab. In the Table of Contents group, from the Table of Contents drop-down list, select a TOC style.
The TOC is now generated at the beginning of the document.
How easy was that! In a few simple steps, you’ve got yourself a pretty professional looking TOC.
There’s quite a bit more to setting up TOC. You can customize a TOC by changing the styles, adding, or removing a style and so on. The cool factor is that the Update Table option in the Table of Contents page lets you refresh the changes made so you don’t have to manually regenerate the TOC each time you make a change.
If you have created a TOC and have a tip or two to share with us, let us know in the comments section.
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