Show part of a caption in List of Figures (2003)

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Our technical reports are full of figures. We use Word’s captions to create a list of Figures in the reports. The problem is that the scientists put these long, multiple line captions for the figures, but they only want the first 5-8 words of the caption to show in the Table of Contents. How do I do that?

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You’d have to exclude the Caption style from the TOC, and create special TC fields for the entries to be used in the TOC.
You’d have to specify in the options of the TOC that you want to include the fields.

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yuk. Ok that’s sorta what I thought. I haven’t used TC fields before. I do know how to modify the options in the Table of Contents though. I’ll go read up on using TC fields and see what I can come up with. Thanks, Hans.

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Hans, I found a tip from Suzanne Barnhill that said to separate the caption , format the 2nd part as something like body text, and hide the separating paragraph mark. It worked! Do you know of any pitfalls to using this method? I still need to learn how to use TC fields, but I’m trying to make this as easy as possible for the scientits to use in their reports. Thanks.

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That’s a clever tip, and I don’t think it’ll cause problems.

You can type the first part of the caption, press Ctrl+Alt+Enter to insert a style separator, then type the rest and apply a different style to it.
See How to use outline levels to create a table of contents (TOC) in Word 2003 and in Word 2002 for more details.

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Hi Hans,

I don’t recall the exact tip but there was something that allowed one to type a Heading, do something, and then switch to another style. That allowed you to have your body text start on the same line as a heading.

I tried CTRL+ALT+enter on the above and it worked fine. So it seems this might work anywhere where you want to switch styles in the middle of a “paragraph”. In the case of the captions, though, you do want to switch styles but to one that looks exactly the same as the Caption style. That way, the TOC only picks up the Caption style. At least that’s the way it worked for a heading.

Fred

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