Tools for Information Literacy
Indexes
What, then, is an index?
A Table of Contents enables the reader to navigate to certain sections. A well-constructed index will help the reader to locate all information about a specific topic within that document, by providing a detailed listing of the topics within the document.
An index is often not required, nor needed. But for when a document needs, and could benefit from one, knowing how to create one is useful.
As we just discussed, the table of contents tool looks for the heading markup to understand what to find in the document for the table of contents.
The index tool, on the other hand, needs you to mark the words or phrases in the document that you want the index tool to find. This is easier than it might seem, but it requires a bit of understanding of the other tools available to you in the program.
- you need to use the find tool to find an instance of a word or phrase that you wish to add to the index
- once a word or phrase is found, you need to use the index markup tool to identify its location
- once you have all the words or phrases markup up in your document, your index insertion tool will place your index exactly where you want it located
Again, Tech Republic has a pretty good discussion of how to do this, but we will get some hands on experience in our recitation sessions.