Tools for Information Literacy | Week ⑩ 
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.

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(s)
• 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.

Using the Index tool

You don't have to create an index for task 03, but it wouldn't hurt to know how to do it.

For this example, we used The Thirty-nine Steps, by John Buchan. It is a novel and thus an index is neither needed, nor useful. But we can use this document to practice creating an index, so that when we really need one, we will know how to make one.

To prepare a place to put an index, we'll go to the last page and enter the work "Index" as a heading 1.

Go to that location and generate a new line of text below the word index. Be sure that the new paragraph object is formatted as Normal style.

We want to insert an Index, so open the "Mark Entry" dialog box from the References ribbon.

If you need to add an index, you must mark up all the text to index ...

1. Mark Entry opens the dialog box. Of course, we may not know exactly where the words we want to index are located.
2. So we use the find tool in the Navigation sidebar to find a word or phrase
   • the cntl+f tool opens the find tool in the Navigation sidebar
   • enter the word we wish to index, then find the next example of it.

3. and then Mark All to embed some XML into the document as hidden text

You will note that the Mark Index Entry tool adds some hidden text to the document. You will not see this text when the document prints, but you can see it when you have the Show/Hide button selected.

This is the markup the index tool is looking for.

Now that you have your document marked up for the index tool, create an index.

1. The first thing you need to do is to be sure where your cursor is located because the index tool will place the index where the cursor is located.
2. then open the insert index dialog box from the references ribbon
   • we'll go with the two column index for this example
3. and say OK

Final steps

We might have to do some editing to the index (changing Chambers to Chambers, for example), but we have an index.

If one now goes back to edit the document, the page numbers in the index might be affected. But we can always select the index object and update it, and the tool will re-paginate the index.