How to Create a Table of Authorities in Word (Windows)

The whole workflow at a glance

Step 1: Mark a citation (long and short citation)

Step 2: Mark All, Mark and Next Citation

Mark All tags every place the long and short citation text appears. It is fast, but it matches text, not meaning: a party name in a heading or a different case with the same name gets tagged too. Next Citation moves to the next likely citation in the document, so you can review and mark instances one at a time.

The dialog can stay open while you work: select the next citation in the brief, click back into the dialog, and mark it. If you add citations later, Microsoft's advice is to select the original citation, press Alt+Shift+I and click Mark All again.

Short forms and Id.

Word only links a later reference to an authority when the text matches the short citation you entered. A reference by a different short form, or an Id., is not linked automatically. To count those pages, select the reference, open Mark Citation, pick the authority from the list under Short citation, and click Mark. Whether Id. references should add page numbers at all is a convention question — see Id. and supra in a table of authorities.

Categories: 16 slots, 7 named by default

Microsoft's TA field reference confirms that the \c number "corresponds to the order of categories in the Category box" and that category 1 (Cases) is the default if \c is omitted; the default names for 3, 4, 6 and 7 are as listed in law-library brief guides (Drake, University of Hawaiʻi). The table prints categories in number order, so the numbering is also your heading order.

Check the category list on the computer that will build the final table. On Microsoft's Q&A forum, users report renamed categories showing up as plain numbers when the same document opens on another machine — the TA fields keep their number; the name you see can differ.

What Word inserts: TA fields and hidden text

Every mark becomes a field like { TA \l "Baldwin v. Alberti, 58 Wn. 2d 243 (1961)" \s "Baldwin v. Alberti" \c 1 \b }, formatted as hidden text. You won't see it until you click Show/Hide ¶ (Home › Paragraph, or Ctrl+Shift+8). Alt+F9, which toggles other field codes, does not reveal TA fields. To correct an entry, edit the text inside the quotation marks of its TA field, then update the table; to remove one, select the whole field including the braces and press Delete.

Step 3: Insert the table of authorities

Step 4: Update the table after every edit

The table is a snapshot. If you add, delete, move or edit text, click to the left of the table and press F9 (on some laptops Fn+F9). Word rebuilds it from the TA fields and the current pagination. Do not type corrections into the finished table — Microsoft warns "your changes will be lost when you update the table of authorities." For extra safety, File › Options › Display › Update fields before printing refreshes fields when you print or preview. Pagination problems after updating are covered in table of authorities page numbers wrong.

Common pitfalls

When a generator saves time

Word's built-in method is free and reliable once the marking is right; the cost is the marking itself — slow on a long brief, and it must be repeated for every citation added late. Tools now automate the marking step by writing the same TA fields into your .docx: BriefMark does this today (Word .docx only, free up to 8 authorities, $99 one-time, as published on its site). A different route is to build the table from the final PDF, which avoids marking and takes page numbers from the pages you actually file.