Indexing WORD Documents

References and tutorials

Good description of the Concordance file approach  http://www.tekdok.com/indexing.htm
  MS Support description of Indexing through field codes http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q125/9/37.asp?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0

Index entries using page ranges
http://support.microsoft.com/support/kb/articles/Q196/6/74.ASP?LN=EN-US&SD=gn&FR=0

  MS knowledgebase troubleshooting on Indexing (or whatever else you want tot search for)
http://search.support.microsoft.com/kb/c.asp?ln=en-us

An Outline of Indexing in WORD

The general approach to setting up automatic index tables is
  1.  mark entries in the text,
    1.  specify text to be indexed
    2.  Index entry to associate this text with
    3.  Automatically find and mark this same text string throughout the document
  2.  Usually at the end of the document-Insert the Index
  3.  Specify styles for the text in the Index
Indexes can be updated either by F9; or right click, update; or rebuilding from the start by Insert, tables, index.

Mark entries in the text using a concordance file:


One way is to set up a concordance file that lists strings to be searched for and marked, along with the associated term used in the index.  for example, incidents of the string "Corvettes" might be listed in the index under "Automobiles."  Indexing is also case sensitive, and a concordance file can help you deal with that as well.
I've developed a way to generate a concordance file from an existing embedded Index in WORD.
Frequently, I've produced a second edition of a book has new chapters that require indexing. I haven’t been able to find an easy way to simply extend the existing index using WORD.
Some commercially available utilities, such as DEXterIndex are supposed to extract a table of terms from an existing document with embedded indexing, but I’ve not been able to get that to work consistently. Here is a method to achieve reindexing without using a third party utility.
 

How to extend an existing index in WORD to new added text:

(Or, a method for extracting a list of index terms from an embedded Index in WORD)

(Or, an easier way to make a concordance file, using the document to first generate a preliminary index.)


WORD’s help file suggests making a concordance file by copying and pasting terms from the document. It seems it would be easier to generate the term list by perusing the document, using alt-shift-X to mark good terms, then insert an idex and process the index to give a concordance file.
 

Extract Index terms from the current document index.


Copy the current index table and paste it into a text file (e.g. notepad) this converts it from a field into text.  To remove the page numbers, copy and paste the text into EXCEL. Use data /text to columns, comma delimited, to separate terms from page numbers. Delete all but the first column that has the terms in it.
Fix any problems such as duplicates with upper case and lower case first letters. Copy and paste into WORD, you can convert the resulting table to text via table convert table to text.
 

Remove current index fields from the document:

Use edit replace more, special, fields and replace all with nothing in the replace with entry.
 

Redo the index marking on the cleaned up document.


One way is to put the resulting word list into the document, then use alt-shift-X on each term to mark all occurrences in the document, then delete your term list, go to the end of the document and Insert reference / Index as you would normally do.  You can, of course mark additional entries from the rest of the text at this time to add more entries to the index

Another way is to create a concordance file from your list of terms. This would leave you in better shape for the next edition, and makes it easier to deal with issues like upper and lower case instances of the terms.
 

It’s most convenient to generate the concordance file in EXCEL.

Copy the term list to a couple of other columns.  Convert one copy to all lower case using the EXCEL function lower, then convert the results to text using copy, paste special/values.
Convert another copy to 1st letter upper case by using data/text to columns, fixed width to parse out the first letter, convert that to upper case with the Upper function, then concatenate to recombine the words, and change the result to text using copy, paste special/values.

The concordance file has two columns. The first is the exact text to find and mark (case sensitive), and the second is the entry that appears in the index.
You will need a separate row for each variant of the text to be marked. Variants might include case differences or other word forms.
You can create a subentry for an index entry in the second column by using a colon after the main entry, then type the subentry.
 

Using the concordance file to mark text in the document and creating the index.


Copy the EXCEL columns into word. This will give you a table. Save the WORD document as your concordance file. Once the concordance file is created, the rest is just follow the usual procedures to automark text, then insert your index at the end of the document.
 

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