Creating an Index in Word 97 July 21, 2003Computer Services - 1 - St. Norbert College

Creating an Index in Word 97To create an index, you must first mark the index entries in your document, then you build the index. Word willcreate the index, sort it alphabetically, and remove duplicate entries from the same page.

Marking index entriesBefore building an index, you must first mark the index entries in your document. The easiest way to do this is to usea concordance file.

Creating a concordance file

A concordance file is a separate file in which you list all of the words in your document that you want indexed, alongwith their corresponding entries in the index. This file is set up as a 2-column table with index references in onecolumn and their corresponding index entries in the other (instructions below). Word searches your document foreach occurrence of the text in the first column of the concordance file, and creates the index entries accordingly.

1. Open a new document and create a two-column table (any number of rows).2. In the first column, enter the text you want Word to search for in your document (the one youre indexing) and

mark as an index reference. Make sure to enter the text exactly as it appears in the document*. Press TAB.3. In the second column, type the index entry for the text in the first column. Press TAB.

To create a subentry, type the main entry followed by a colon and the subentry (e.g., volcanoes:lava).*To make sure Word marks all the text you want to index, list all forms of the text you want to search for. Forexample, type erupt, erupting, and eruption in three separate cells in the left column, and then typevolcanoes in each of the matching cells in the right column (see the sample concordance file, below).

4. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each index reference. (To get a new row, press TAB in the last cell of the table.)5. Save the concordance file. You can now use the concordance file to automatically mark the index entries in your

document (see the section Automatically marking index entries using a concordance file, below, for details).

Sample Concordance File

erupt volcanoeserupting volcanoeseruption volcanoesvolcanoes volcanoesvolcanoes:lava volcanoes

Tip: To speed up the creation of a concordance file, you can open both the concordance file and the document youwant to index. To see both documents at once, choose Arrange All from the Window menu. You can then copy textfrom the document you want to index, and paste it into the first column of the concordance file.

Automatically marking index entries using a concordance file

1. Once youve created the concordance file (see previous section), open the document you want to index.2. From the Insert menu, choose Index and Tables, then click the Index tab, and click on the AutoMark button.3. Locate the concordance file you want to use, click on it, and click Open. Word will search the document for each

exact occurrence of text in the first column of the concordance file, and then use the text in the second column asthe index entry. Word marks only the first occurrence of an entry in each paragraph.

Creating the index1. Once youve created the concordance file and marked the index entries in your document, (see previous section),

click in your document where you want to insert the finished index. You will probably want to insert a new blankpage at the end for the index (click at the end of your document and choose Insert Break Page Break).

2. From the Insert menu, choose Index and Tables, then click on the Index tab.3. To use one of the available designs, choose a design under Formats (click on each one to see a sample).4. Choose the number of columns and other formatting options, then click OK.

Questions? Contact the Computer Services Help Desk at (920) 403-HELP (4357).

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in theindex

to refer toall referencesto thesewords inthe text.