The Question posed on LinkedIn.

“Somebody asked me why we continued placing the TOC, List of Figures, and List of Tables at the beginning of a document and not having one these at the beginning of each section/chapter.

Several years ago I released technical manuals using section-based TOCs and other lists. However, that was because Word 97 in my PC (Win 98) could not work with large documents. Once I had a powerful enough PC/Word combination, I never did it again.

I mostly update the TOC and the other lists doing Ctrl-A + F9, which brings up the “Update XXX” dialog box for each table. Since I use appendixes, this methods also generates dialog boxes for them as well. I realize that using TOCs and lists at the beginning of each section would make the updating process longer, as more dialog boxes would pop-up.

However, I now ask myself whether it would be advantageous to do such thing, and why. ”

My advice:

At the beginning of the document as it is easy to find. A sub TOC at the start or each chapter could be a bit more informative.

Word is very bad for formatting and tables, but it seems “everyone” besides the graphic design industry uses it or something similarly bad.