I was reminded of both working at Quintrex as well as working with the Senior Technical Writer at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa when I read Page Ranges in a TOC this morning, which says the following:
Colin asked if it is possible to construct a table of contents so it includes not just a starting page number, but a range of page numbers. For instance, the table of contents would include 1-1 to 1-22 instead of just 1-1.
Unfortunately, this is not possible in Word. The table of contents feature is designed to only include starting page numbers. It would appear that this decision is related to the fact that determining a starting page number is easy (it is the page on which the related heading starts), but an ending page number for a section is not as easily determined. Where a section ends depends on what headings you instruct Word to include in the TOC.
If you want page ranges in your TOC, the only way to get them is to manually enter the TOC and not rely on Word to create one automatically.
When I worked at Quintrex, BSS was my co-worker. He used to write documentation in Microsoft Word.
One day, he showed me that how he created a table of contents for one of his documents.
For each section that he wanted to have included in the table of contents, he selected the text and clicked Insert > Bookmark. He repeated this process for each heading throughout his document.
Then, on the table of contents page, he typed the name of each bookmark - he did not use any Word styles in his document - typed the leader dots [.....], then the page number. After typing the page number, he selected the page number and clicked Insert > Hyperlink and selected a heading in his document. He repeated this process for each heading in his document.
Thankfully, when he showed me his process, I was able to show him how to insert a TOC field which automatically builds the table of contents.
I chuckle about it now. When I left Quintrex to go to the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa, the tool that was being used for one of the user guides was InDesign. In context, InDesign is typically used by a marketing department to create short (generally, under 10 pages) documents. However, at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa, InDesign was being used for a (roughly) 150 page user guide. The Senior Technical Writer at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa followed a similar process of manually creating the table of contents for that 150 page user guide. In fact, the Senior Technical Writer at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa went a step further and printed the entire 150 page user guide to manually verify that the page number in the table of contents matched the actual page in the body of the document. The Senior Technical Writer at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa went further to brag about staying at work until midnight on the night before the new version of the 150 page user guide was due, providing details of printing the 150 page user guide multiple times which, to me, proved that the process followed by Senior Technical Writer at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa was ... stupid. It was an absolutely terrible process and to brag about being required to be working on the 150 page user guide until midnight beautifully illustrates how the process was a broken process and the utter and complete incompetence of that Senior Technical Writer at the Unnamed Hellhole in southern Iowa.
It is good advice to tell someone (Colin) that the intended goal is dumb. If you really want to know when a section ends, look at the table of contents. For example, look at this table of contents:
Section 1............... 1
Section 2............... 15
You can see that Section 1 starts on page 1 and Section 2 begins on page
15. That tells someone looking at the table of contents that Section 1 is 14 pages (pages 1 through 14). As a side note, I'd add that I've never seen a table of contents that shows a page range for a section. It is always good advice to tell someone (Colin) that the intended goal of what you want to do is unattainable. As it is written, the author of Page Ranges in a TOC made me think of two former co-workers who manually created a table of contents, which is wrong.
