The Shrinking Proposal Headings
Priya is finishing a 14-page funding proposal. She typed each section heading in bold 14 pt and pressed Enter twice after each one. When she later changed the body font to 11 pt, the headings still look correct on screen, but the reviewer says the document's navigation pane shows only the title, and the heading text does not appear in the table of contents she generated. She also notices that when she deletes a paragraph, the spacing above the next heading changes. A colleague suggests she 'just make the headings bigger' rather than change anything structural.
1. Diagnose why the headings do not appear in the navigation pane or the generated table of contents, and recommend the minimal fix.
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The headings were formatted directly (bold + larger font + blank lines), not with heading styles. Word's navigation pane and automatic TOC read paragraph style levels (Heading 1, Heading 2...), not visual appearance.
Minimal fix:
- Place the cursor in each heading and apply the built-in Heading 1/Heading 2 style instead of manual bold/size.
- Remove the extra empty paragraphs used for spacing; spacing belongs in the style's Space Before/After settings.
- Update the TOC field (References > Update Table) so it repopulates.
This also fixes the unstable spacing: blank-line spacing collapses unpredictably when paragraphs are deleted, whereas style-based spacing is consistent.
2. The colleague says to enlarge the headings instead. Explain why that does not solve the stated symptoms.
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Enlarging text changes only appearance. The navigation pane and TOC depend on outline level, which comes from the paragraph style (or an explicit outline level set in Paragraph settings). A bigger manually formatted paragraph is still body text with outline level 'Body Text', so it stays invisible to both features. Manual formatting also has to be redone on every heading and drifts out of consistency, whereas editing the Heading style once updates all headings at once.