In this tip I want to show you word style inspector. It's a great feature to use when troubleshooting styles within a document. In my sample document, I've got a problem with my table of contents. The people from my bibliography should not be included in the table of contents. But for some reason they are appearing in the table of contents. So I need to take a look at my styles.

So I'm going to come down to the body of my document, and make sure I'm on the Home tab, come over to the Styles group, and click on the style sidebar. Now when I click within the name, and come over and look at the style, it's not a heading style. So there's something going on because my table of contents is based upon Heading One, two, and three. So to investigate this a little bit further, I'm going to turn on the style inspector. So we come down to the bottom of the style sidebar, we'll click on style inspector. Once I do that, it opens up the sidebar for silent specter.

And from here I can see where the issue is. names have a paragraph style and also a text level style. Now the problem with that, because they do have a paragraph style of heading one is going to appear in the table of contents. So I need to correct that. So what I'm going to do highlight, clear and reapply the style without the paragraph formatting. You can see it even changes the appearance of it.

So one of the things that you need to look at when you're applying styles is what type of style it is as well. This had a paragraph level formatting and a text level formatting on it. And both of them would be applied because they're different types of styles, but that's what was causing the difference. And in order to see that I had to go into the style inspector to pull it up. So I'm going to go through and fix the rest of them in my document. And I'm going to come back up to my table of contents to a right click Update field, update the entire table and they've been removed So keep in mind if you're having problems or your styles aren't functioning the way you think they should pull up the style inspector to take a look at them a little bit deeper to see what else could be going on with them.