How To Create And Update Table of Figure in Microsoft Word

The “Insert Table of figures” feature is one that comes in handy when you have a document that has a lot of figures.

What it does is to generate a list of figure caption that appear in a document, and also update the list with a single keypress; Microsoft 2010 and 2013 both have this feature work automatically, and most of the time, you don’t even have to use the “Caption” option, as Word would pick out labels based on the unique text style used, to create the table.

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It is far less stressful to do this than to draw and maintain a table of figures by hand. In this post, we shall be highlighting the process of creating and update a table of figures in Microsoft Word.

How to create and update table of figures in Microsoft Word

You can use the “Insert Caption” option in the “Reference” tab to create a Table of Figure. Just hold the “Ctrl” and click on the item in the table to jump to a figure, you can then add figure captions. You use this option for when you already have figure labels as part of your document text.

All you need to do is to select the text from the figure, open the “Home” tab, and pick a style from the Styles section; could be the “Subtitle” or “Quote”, basically something that isn’t used anywhere in the document.

 

Place the cursor where you want the Table to be, then you’ll click the “Insert Table of Figures” on the Reference tab to create the table.

You can adjust the table’s formatting (including whether to show page numbers or altering the style of the tab leader) by using the pre-set style. You can do this by picking an option from the “Formats” drop-down menu.

If you wish to customize the styles, just leave the option to “From Template”. Click on “Modify” and on “Modify” again in the style window to customize the style of the window.
You can also change the table’s font, size or other settings and press “OK” for both the “Modify Style” and “Style Windows”.

If you wish to create and update the table based on the text style, rather than what was taken from the “Insert Caption”, click on the “Option”, check “Style” and select the style used for your figure labels.

Once done with all of that, click “OK” to insert the table. To update your table, all that’s needed is to press “F9” to update the table with any changes you’ve made to the figure labels.

Pick “Update Page Numbers only” if you’ve already moved figures between pages. Pick “Update Entire Table” if you’ve already changed the figure texts, or have added or removed figures.

Adding and updating a Table of Figures comes automatically for Microsoft 2010 and 2013, and with just a single keypress, you could arrange, sort and update your table of figures, but for other versions of Microsoft Word, table of figures could be created and updated using the aforementioned steps.