How do you get rid of the top blank 'dot' hierarchy point in a table of contents macro?

[Ben Loughton]

Guys, i'm sure we are all aware of the 'blank' dot that appears in the hierarchy macro when displaying a table of contents?

This is driving multiple divisions at my company, crazy.  Any ideas?

Thanks.

Ben.

[Hal Schoolcraft]

I found that when I added the table of contents after I had created some content, the line containing the TOC macro retained the Heading style attribute that the previous first line had. Changing the style for the line containing the TOC macro back to Paragraph fixed the problem.

[Sarah Underwood]

You are a lifesaver, thank you for posting this! 

[Mike Loux]

OMG, that was so simple.  Feeling kind of dumb now.  You RAWK.  

[Rounak Agarwal]

This was really helpful. Thanks

[Jon Mulhern]

Thanks Hal!

[Jagan]

Thanks, it worked

[Unni Flagtveit]

Thanks Hal!

[vangel]

Thank you!  

[stephanie.rothfuchs]

Awesome! Thank you! Such a simple fix

[Kim Abbott]

Thank you!!!

[Natechawin Suthison]

Thanks a lot!!

[Dominic Giger]

Hal, you totally rock and just made my day! :) 

[Neal Madlani]

That was driving me spare!

[Moshe Ben-Ezra]

In my case this solved the problem:

My first section looked

[table of contents]
my first header [H1]

Aparently, the newline after [table of contents] was also H1 and it caused the problem. so I deleted it:

[table of contents]my first header

and then entered a (soft?) new line SHIFT-RETURN to seperate them
[table of contents]
my first header [H1]

and the empty dot disappeared.

[Vincent Cirilo]

Thank you this solved the issue. Although I think it can be simplified. 

You need to remove the line between the Table of contents and the first header.

Simple explanation:

Setup page like this: [table of contents]first header [H1]

• Between the [table of contents] and first header click SHIFT-RETURN

• This will move the first header down without a space between the two

[Samantha Joksas]

I found the above solution worked, changing the heading to paragraph.

When i edit my document, and put my cursor at the end of my table (so right beside my table) it was recognizing the table as being in header format, so i changed that format to paragraph and saved and it removed the dot. 

[Rodney Hughes]

I haven't seen that myself!

can you provide a picture of it?

Sorry to ask given it seems many are experiencing this: Are you sure you don't have an extra line before the heading line that is also marked as that heading style - it might be an empty line but still holding the heading style so it finds the line and includes it in the list albeit the line has no text on it