Have you ever wondered who compiles the indexes at the end of books? Traditionally, this has been a specialist profession. However, these days, you can add an index to a document yourself. In this post, for example, we’re looking at how to create an index in Microsoft Word.
Most documents don’t need an index. In fact, it is usually only book-length non-fiction that does! And even if you are writing a non-fiction book, indexing is often handled by the publisher.
However, if you want to self-publish a work of non-fiction – or if you are creating another long document such as a company handbook – you may want to add an index yourself. And this is where the indexing options in Microsoft Word become very useful. This process involves two steps:
We’ll now look at how to create an index in more detail below.
Most of the work of creating an index comes with marking text. This means going through the document to look for terms you want to include in the final index. To mark an entry:
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The options in the Mark Entry dialogue box mentioned above will let you:
Make sure to do this for every term that you want to include in the index. If you need to “unmark” a term, you will first need to turn on hidden text in Word. You will then be able to see, and if required remove, the index entry in curly brackets. Make sure to do this for all similar entries.
Once you have marked your entries, all that’s left is to create an index:
Microsoft Word will generate an index based on your marked entries. If you change any of the marked entries, you can then update the index at the click of a button by going to References > Index > Update Index.
