Style Separators are one of Word’s most under-used and handy tools.  They are an important part of building tables of contents (TOC) for complex legal documents. Word bases its TOC generation on Styles. Because of this anything and everything in a particular style is slated to be included in the TOC. Style Separators allow you to control what appears in your TOC. For example, you could include the first four words of a heading rather than the entire heading.

Let’s suppose you have a brief that looks like this:

Brief

The headings used for the different sections are part of the paragraph. This causes a problem when generating a TOC because Word will pull in the entire paragraph as the TOC entry. This is generally not what is wanted. To stop this, we will use a Style Separator.

1. The first step in using a Style Separator, is adding a hard return where the Style Separator is to be inserted.

Hard Return

Don’t worry that this creates two separate paragraphs, and meddles with numbering; this will all be fixed when we insert the Style Separator.

2. Place your cursor at the end of the first line. This marks the end of the text to be included in the TOC.

3. Click the Style Separator button on the Quick Access toolbar, if available. Alternately, insert a Style Separator using Ctrl + Alt + Enter.

The Style Separator inserts and the paragraphs rejoin.

Paragraphs Rejoin

 

4. Click in the second part of the paragraph, following the Style Separator.

5. Apply a body text style to the remainder of the paragraph.  Apply any additional formatting as necessary.

Advertisement