edit table of contents

By going to Layout > Table of Contents > (be sure to click More Options) and make choices there.

In this dialog box, you give InDesign the choice of what paragraph styles to look for and gather. Further, once that text is gathered, you also are making choices of how to dress up the resulting text thread with Table of Contents paragraph styles, so that it looks like a table of contents. Something many people forget to do is to Save a style (really a preset) so that the InDesign document can update its Table of Contents to look the same way as before: Text gathered and dressed with styles that lay the text out to look like a Table of Contents. 

In summary, InDesign hunts and gathers based on styles; then dresses the result with other styles; then remembers all your choices in the process by saving a named style, which isn't a style but rather a preset.

https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/creating-table-contents.html

Hi Hendy:

As per @James Gifford—NitroPress, you might want to pause, and read about how to create, format and manage a generated table of contents. You can start with this link: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/creating-table-contents.html but you will find plenty of additional resources if you look online. I wouldn't continue until you do.

Here is the most import principle of a table of contents created using Layout > Table of Contents: A table of contents is simply a list of paragraphs (headings, specifically) that InDesign types up for you, based on your paragraph heading styles. Knowing that you are working on a cookbook, you might tell InDesign to call in the section heads (Soup, Entrées, Desserts) and the recipe titles (Cream of Chicken Soup). They will be typed up in chronological order, meaning the order in which they appear in the book. 

You can absolutely edit a table of contents:

• If you see a typo in a heading, (i.e., Cream of Chiken Soup), navigate to the chicken soup page, fix it there, and then update the Table of Contents (TOC). InDesign retypes the entire TOC for you. (See @jmlevy's note.)
  • For that reason, we don't ever type on the generated TOC, because the next time we update the TOC, we lose the manual edits on the TOC as inDesign retypes the entire thing. (See @Peter Kahrel's note.)
  • For that reason, we do format the TOC with styles created specifically for the TOC entries, and we map the body styles to the TOC styles when we updated. (See @Dave Creamer of IDEAS's note above.) The styles are reapplied after each update.
• If you see a mistake in the formatting, edit the styles you created to control it.

As James noted, this is complicated. Please spend some time reading up on this first, and then give it another try.

~Barb

Did you genertae your TOC using the TOC feature? If yes, just go to the Page menu > Update TOC (or something similar, I use a French version)

Once created, a TOC is more or less just text. Edit away.

All your changes will be lost if you update the TOC, though, so the usual practice/goal is to adjust the TOC setup until you get exactly the results you want. Then each update will, well, simply update what you have instead of just creating a new starting point.

There are a lot of subtle settings in the TOC setup/generation menu. One of the most important is sort of invisible: if you make changes, you have to save the TOC 'style' or those changes will be lost after you exit and generate the TOC. Create a named style and be absolutely rigorous in saving it each time, BEFORE exiting/updating.

A good tutorial goes a long ways on TOCs.

It's normal text, so you can edit it like any other text. Just be aware that you'll lose all your changes when you re-generate the TOC.