Using markdown to create Table of Contents in Guru cards is time consuming, and difficult for new folks to learn. Often folks skip this step, OR when they add a new section to a card, they forget to update the TOC. Would love a solution like Google Docs has where I can easily and quickly convert my headings into a TOC that is updated any time a new heading is added.
Our use case:
While we keep our Guru cards tied to specific topics, they often cover technical topics that can’t be covered above the fold. As a result, folks can miss key resources in a Guru Card because they don’t scroll to read the whole thing or miss FAQ sections at the bottom.
To avoid this issue, we add a table of contents to cards that are more than a few paragraphs. Makes it easy and fast for our team to scan the content of a card and ensure they don’t miss key pieces of information.
Currently everyone on our team creates Guru cards and can edit them (we are making a big push for everyone to document things as they learn them).
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YES THIS!
We also heavily use the table of contents for our cards & the markdowns make it very tedious.
Also if we have a ton of headers, you can’t split them into 2 columns or more unless you create a table markdown. But the table markdown its really hard to utilize and makes the table of contents look unappealing. So, we sometimes just have a long running table of contents.
Would love to see this, for the same reasons. Seems like a no-brainer, and it was an immediate disappointment to realise this feature is missing when we started migrating internal knowledge base articles (some of which are unavoidable long and complex) from Google Docs.
Is there any update if Guru already addressed this? I am also finding it hard to do markdowns just for the Table of contents . If it’s an FAQ it makes more sense to have it in 1 card with table of contents instead of having them in multiple cards
Would also love to see this - it’s super time consuming!
Hi Guru Product Team, any feedback on this? This feature is a must-have in a text editing software and markdown is just an incredibly overcomplicated workaround with unnecessarily complicated steps just to have a table of content.
Our company is moving over to Guru and here is where they would like all of my internal instructional documents to reside. The documents that I need to migrate to Guru are several pages long and the Table of Contents is essential. Without links, our help desk/support team finds it very annoying to scroll to the item they need. I have a great number of long documents to upload and so at this time it is not feasible for me to go in and edit HTML code on every one. I really need this feature and it would go far in convincing our management team to go totally over to Guru for all of our documentation.
This is one area (one of the few) where Slab does it right. A hierarchical TOC is auto-generated based on the headings used in the post/card. Slab is hideous in almost every other way, but this feature is spot-on how a TOC should be implemented.
Also, considering the Table of Contents markdown does not work when viewing the cards via the Browser Extension - this would be a HUGE value add. Right now, we eliminated using any table of contents in our cards because our team mainly utilizes the extension, and the feature was broken and confusing teammates.
Huge +1 to Claire’s suggestion for an automated ToC based on headings/subheadings like Google Docs. This continues to be one of the most requested features from my team (both authors and especially our read-only users)
Another knowledgebase we tested had this feature.
You could insert the ToC quickly check or uncheck which headings you’d like displayed.
It also had different ways of displaying it - you could include it in the text/card content, or you could make it a small sidebar.
Some layouts also had related articles appear in this bar. So if you saw in the ToC that the card didn’t have what you needed, you’d have suggestions for other cards immediately below - this was also super helpful (I know these are currently at the bottom of the Gurus)
For Guru, I could especially see as a pop-out/side bar option - agents could open it when they want to use it and close of it’s unnecessary or in the way. Mock up of the idea (I have it popping out to to the left, but I could also see this frozen at the top and pop out below)
User impact:
This would better help users understand what the cards contain, and navigate to the part they need even more quickly.
Not having a Table of Contents function is a missed opportunity to:
decrease cognitive load on behalf of the user (users get a framework of what’s in the card before deciding what to consume/what’s relevant to them)
enable even faster navigation
encourage more standardized headings to promote that faster navigation
Having a table of contents would be really helpful.
I often write Guru cards about software features where my content has no logical order and where most of the content is not relevant to what the person is looking for, only a small part of it. e.g. I have to include pricing, how to set up, how to troubleshoot, whom to contact with certain types of questions, how to delete, etc. and I want to have a quick way for team to access the info they need without having to scroll through everything.
Thanks to everyone for all the helpful feedback and commentary! This is absolutely on our radar and something we have in our long-term plans. Unfortunately, updates like this and more will have to wait until our Editor Rewrite is complete - you can learn more about that project here!
Glad it’s in Guru’s long term plans! Excited to see the post around the rewrite release. Thanks!
@Snigdha Nigam Looks like this feature is on the roadmap…!
Absolutely! This is a must need.
I am finding that this method does not work when a card is opened in full screen (when viewing via app.getguru.com). Is anyone else having this issue? Is there a way around it?
Table of contents is a basic feature you would expect to see, especially when you’re creating functional specifications or documenting complex features within a product. Notion and other wiki programs do this. Also most people are used to creating and writing content with a TOC. A big upvote from us to this!
The following idea has been merged into this idea: All the votes have been transferred into this idea.
He!y!
Huge +1 to Claire’s suggestion for an automated ToC based on headings/subheadings like Google Docs. This continues to be one of the most requested features from my team (both authors and especially our read-only users)
Another knowledgebase we tested had this feature.
You could insert the ToC quickly check or uncheck which headings you’d like displayed.
It also had different ways of displaying it - you could include it in the text/card content, or you could make it a small sidebar.
Some layouts also had related articles appear in this bar. So if you saw in the ToC that the card didn’t have what you needed, you’d have suggestions for other cards immediately below - this was also super helpful (I know these are currently at the bottom of the Gurus)
For Guru, I could especially see as a pop-out/side bar option - agents could open it when they want to use it and close of it’s unnecessary or in the way. Mock up of the idea (I have it popping out to to the left, but I could also see this frozen at the top and pop out below)
User impact:
This would better help users understand what the cards contain, and navigate to the part they need even more quickly.
Not having a Table of Contents function is a missed opportunity to:
decrease cognitive load on behalf of the user (users get a framework of what’s in the card before deciding what to consume/what’s relevant to them)
enable even faster navigation
encourage more standardized headings to promote that faster navigation
This would be great for us! It makes it so much easier for our authors to edit the content.
This would be SUCH an incredible feature! Guru, I simply cannot wait for this to be added. I’ll keep struggling along with Google Docs / Notion in the meantime...
+1 on this - the problem I’d like to solve is linking users to a specific section in a Guru card from outside of Guru.
For example, we are creating documentation on how our team can use specific dashboards/software. We might have a card that walks through how to use a specific dashboard, what all the charts/visuals tell you, what alerts to set up on that dashboard, etc…
When folks get to the “what alerts should I set up” button on the dashboard, I want to link them directly to the section on the relevant card. Creating a separate card for each section related to each dashboard would be too much bloat.
I want to create robust interlinking to and from Guru, and being able to link to specific sections of Guru cards from other places would increase usage of Guru.
Given we’ve now used Guru for a few years, we’re finding we have a lot of cards. By no means is this a bad thing but discoverability then becomes an issue.
We’re currently experimenting with drafting lengthier cards that house more related content instead of having “concise” single cards that have a common theme. These cards are easier to find and then also let folks know that if the answer is not on that card, it doesn’t exist elsewhere (i.e. less time searching).
I think a feature like this would really allow Guru to grow along the knowledge managers that use it. Table of Contents would let people jump to what they need but also be able to view related information quickly.
Hey Guru team, this post is from a year ago and has been upvoted over 100 times. What’s the timeline for this feature?
I want to echo a desire in with the ToC feature to include anchor links to specific sections in the card (that can be referenced in the card itself or from other cards). While we try to keep our cards “bite-sized,” our technical documentation often is more robust and linking to a specific section from other cards helps our team be more efficient and work more effectively. Without the linking, they have to try and find the specific section name that is hopefully contextualized/described clearly by the author.
+1 for ToC feature - we would love to see this supported the typical way with Markdown like this:
- Top Header] (#top-header)
- Sub Header] (#sub-header)
Where the markdown content is like this:
# Top Header
some content
## Sub Header
some more content
or better yet have the ToC auto-generated based on Markdown headers.
This would really make engineers happy to use Guru for technical docs!
