I have suggested both those tricks for investigation, but I hadn't actually
tried them. What I have just discovered, however, is that a nonbreaking
space does not work, but a character formatted as white does--even without
the \w switch! Note that this technique will work only for left-aligned
headings (the tab followed by a character would throw off the alignment of
centered ones); the length of the heading should not be a problem, since
headings longer than about 2/3 of a line (or less) should be wrapped to the
next line anyway.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
Word MVP FAQ site: http://word.mvps.org
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

"Bob S" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 6 Jan 2005 12:13:10 -0600, "Suzanne S. Barnhill"
wrote:

You don't--at least not without a lot of tedious work. The way this
*should*
work is as follows:

1. You set a right tab stop short of the page numbers and give it a
period
leader, removing the leader from the page number tab stop.

2. You then have to get Word to honor an extra tab character in the TOC
entry (since two tab characters will be required to reach the page number
tab stop). This is where the trouble begins.

3. You insert a tab character at the end of the heading in the document,
then add the \w switch to the TOC field, which is supposed to preserve
tab
characters in TOC entries (and apparently does in some situations), but
this
just doesn't work: the trailing tab character is ignored.

It may occur to you to insert an extra tab character in each TOC entry
manually, but every time you update the TOC, it will be removed. The only
thing that will work, therefore, is to wait until editing is complete and
you are confident that no page numbers will change, then either unlink
the
TOC and add the tab characters or add the tab characters and lock the
TOC.

It's really annoying that all the above is true, but it's a sad fact.
Sorry.

With regard to the trailing tab characters being ignored:

It occurs to me that this may be Word suppressing trailing white
space, and that you might be able to avoid Word's "assistance" by
convincing it that the white space was not trailing.

Have you tried adding a tab plus a non-breaking space, or a tab plus
an ordinary letter formatted as white?

Bob S