MS Word 2010 Table of Contents text formatting

Question

In Word 2010 I've set up the Table of Contents to create entries for Heading Styles. It is working fine with this exception:

Some of my headings are in tables that are built from templates in quick parts. The template includes heading style 2 where I've changed the text color (in the table, not the style) to white as the fill color is dark. In those cases, the TOC picks up the entries correctly but the the Table of Contents displays the entry (page numbers are OK) as white text. Of course the white text is on white background and doesn't appear.

I can select the text in the TOC and change the font color which works, but every time I update the field it reverts back to white. I've edited the field and modified the font (TOC 2) to be black but that has no effect on the white text. I've confirmed that the style TOC 2 is the style in the table and that the style shows black text. Yet the entry continues to be white.

The easiest solution would be to force the TOC to list text in black but I can't seem to make this happen.

Any idea why this is happening and what I can do to fix it?

Solution 1

If I understand your problem, this should work: Instead of black, select “automatic” as your Heading 2 font color. When you use it in a table with a dark cell shading (background), it will change to white, but will still be black in the TOC entries (this is one of the characteristic differences between "black" and "automatic" font color).

Solution 2

From memory any direct formatting applied to TOC entries (not through a style) in the document body is included in the TOC. So, for instance in your case applying the white color directly to the text and the TOC displaying that text as white sounds like the expected outcome.

The fix would be to create an appropriate style with white font and set the text to use this style instead of applying the formatting directly.