In my case, I had headings over each picture, and sometimes the picture ended-up with the heading style. The problem is caused by having your picture saved with a heading-type STYLE. I still don’t really know what that setting does and why it caused the TOC to misbehave in one doc where it was turned on, but not another that used the same template. I left the other document set as it was (‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!’).

The weird thing is that the other document, where the TOC worked fine, also had this setting turned on, but it wasn’t reporting these odd entries. I wasn’t sure what it did, so I turned it off, re-inserted the TOC and voila! all the odd entries in the TOC disappeared and it was back to how it should be.

However, I noticed a setting for Outline levels that was turned on in the Table of Contents Options window of the Table of Contents window ( References tab > Table of Contents > Insert Table of Contents > Options button). I looked at the misbehaving TOC and there was nothing obvious I could see that was causing the problem. So he sent me links to two of the documents - one where the TOC was misbehaving and the other where it was working as it should. He said TOCs in other docs in the suite of docs that used the same template were working fine. I also got him to re-insert the TOC - that didn’t work either. I walked him through finding out what styles were applied to the paragraphs and all seemed to be OK (I work remotely, so all this was done over the phone). However, a work colleague reported that the TOC in one of his documents was picking up some figure and table captions as well, plus some other weird stuff. Changing the paragraph’s style back to a body text style then updating the TOC solves that problem. Typically, a heading style has been applied to the paragraph containing the text or image, and thus it gets reported in the TOC where the TOC is set up to display text in several levels of headings. I’ve seen normal text and images in an automated Table of Contents (TOC) and they’ve been easy to find and fix.

Customize table of contents word 2016