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Old 11-18-2021, 10:42 PM
Peterson Peterson is offline Windows 10 Office 2019
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This is a really challenging formatting exercise.

The best I could come up with is to create a text box, no border, Wrap Text set to Behind Text; insert a table into the text box, adjust it to match your ToC items, then put it behind the ToC. Adjust row height for multi-line sections.

I also tried to get this to work with styles and formatting, but it's pretty much not going to work and is a total kludge. I'm attaching it for entertainment; note that I only worked on the List of Tables.

First, you have to add tabs after the colons in the in-text table titles, without which the List of Tables won't work.

Next, you have to adjust the List of Figures style to include borders, adjust white space, etc.

Add tabs, as shown in the example.

Note that I've added two "bar" tabs -- I've never used these before, but they add vertical lines. You can't control their thickness, and they are just lines, the aren't columns. You can't split a ToC/List of Tables into columns.

To get the content to fit, use find/replace and make "Table" and the colon hidden text in each item. Leave the space after "Table."

Put the cursor after the first space and add a tab; this pushes the pieces into place.

Got a title that's more than one line? You're done: there's no way deal with it and keep it a dynamic link.

Need to update the table? You have to hide everything all over again.

I understand that people have reasons for wanting what they want: maybe that's how it's always been done, or that's what they were told to do. I get that. At the same time, a table's purpose is to help the reader make sense of data, by grouping it to differentiate data types, show relationships, or simply to help the reader scan across rows or down columns. But grouping table numbers, titles, and page numbers in columns doesn't help the reader use the ToC, List of Tables, etc., nor does adding column headings. If tabular format were useful for ToCs and the like, Word would have this functionality out of the box. Perhaps a ToC in an actual table is common in certain fields or parts of the world I know nothing about, but in 15 years or so of working on technical documents, this is the first time I've seen a table of contents in an actual table.
Attached Files
File Type: docx Sample.docx (26.6 KB, 10 views)
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