What is the importance of a Document Map?

This is how we add a document map to our word document in word 2007.

Go to 'View' ribbon. Navigate to 'Show/Hide' panel and select 'Document Map'.    

So the document map will then be available in a left side panel of our word document.

In document map we have two basic views. Those are the

• Document Map &
• Thumbnail View  

The 'Document Map' will list down all the headings and sub headings in the left panel and the view can also be changed according to preferences. And the thumbnail view will provide an image of each page of our document in the left panel.

Sometimes we wonder why we need a document map which is like another TOC when we already have a TOC in our document.

But which is important in document maps is that it provides a guidance to our word document.

A document map will be really necessary when we are writing  huge word documents and need to add things to different sections and update separate sections in our word document time to time. So then we don't need to travel pages one by one or travel to TOC to find the section each and every time when we need an update.  

Styles in Word need to be utilized in order to obtain the real usage of a document map. Otherwise the document map will look as another copy of our word document.

And the other most vital usage from the document map is that, we can find some formatting errors in our document very easily. For an example lets say that we have applied styles to our document. And the heading styles appear in our document map. Suddenly after updating things in the document, lets say we see normal texts, numbering and captions appearing in the document map. That means our formatting has changed due to some updates in the document. So prior to any DISASTROUS situation, we are able to find that our document formatting has changed . Otherwise what we will encounter issues in our updated TOC.

So we can always use a document map to do our documenting in an easier way.