Find and Replace In XE Entries

[Walter P]

I made a mistake by not adding a colon to all my index entries (18,600) as I
marked them. The colon alows me to segregate surnames from givens with one
surname listing with mutliple given names as a subset. I attempted to use
find and replace to fix the problem which yielded slow results. All I got out
of that was moving from comma to comma (37,000+). There was some
experimentation with all the fields in find and replace resulting in no help
and more frustration. Is there something I'm missing? My Word version is from
Office XP (10.2627.2625). The current index entries appear as Smith, John {
XE "Smith, John"} and need to appear as Smith, John { XE "Smith: John"}.
There has to be a faster way to change all the entries. If there is one, what
is it and how is it done?

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I would still use Find and Replace, but note that what you want is not { XE
"Smith: John"} but { XE "Smith:John"}.

 

[Walter P]

Suzanne;

Thanks for the prompt reply. I had another thought about my issues after
reading your reply to my question. So I set up a custom toolbar with the find
command as its only button. The find window still had my comma in the field
so this worked. It allowed me to park the pointer in one spot and search
faster. Then I setup a convient shortcut key for the colon from the autotext
toolbar. This combination has speeded up the process a lot. That still won't
cure the extra space in the XE entry but that isn't so bad considering the
incorrect formatting it applies to my index subsets. Once again thanks for
the quick reply!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

No need for that if you have a recent version of Word. Once you've used the
Find dialog, you can use the browse arrows (bottom of the vertical scroll
bar) to Find Next/Find Previous.

 

[Walter P]

Suzanne;

Thank you again for your expertise. Yes, my version of Word has those
arrows and they did function as you said they would. Yeeee Haaaaa, I'm in
business now on this index. I can now see light at the end of the tunnel as
well as the headers and footers being done by next weekend. Thank you sooo
much for your help!!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Okay, here's another tip. Although the arrows will let you go to the next
find, they don't allow you to replace, but F4 (Repeat) does. Once you've
done the Replace operation once, it becomes the action to be repeated
(luckily movement of the insertion point doesn't count, so Find Next is not
counted).

I would be willing to bet that it might be possible to carry out the entire
Replace operation with Replace All if you used wildcards (or even without
wildcards if "Smith, John" doesn't appear anywhere in the text other than in
XE fields).

Suzanne;

Thank you again for your expertise. Yes, my version of Word has those
arrows and they did function as you said they would. Yeeee Haaaaa, I'm in
business now on this index. I can now see light at the end of the tunnel as
well as the headers and footers being done by next weekend. Thank you sooo
much for your help!!

 

[Walter P]

The F4 repeat will work better than any other option so far if I turn the
keyboard upside down, I'm a lefty. The right hand seems to be there for
decorations some days. I did try "replace all" with ^d selected as the field
using the drop down menu "special" . All that did was place colons
everywhere. I also tried it with turning wildcards on and off. I had and
still have no idea what wildcard to use but that seems irrelevant from your
latest post. The find part worked well when all I asked of it was to find all
H's withing the document. That cleared up a hundred or more mistakes and was
really fast. Let me type in a four person hypothetical family as it would
appear in this census transcription and my document.
Smith, John { XE "Smith:John" } Head Of Household 47 Married etc
Smith, Jane { XE "Smith:Jane" } Wife 46 Married etc
Smith, Wally { XE "Smith:Wally" } Son 15 Single etc
Smith, Minta { XE "Smith:Minta" }Daughter 13 Single etc
I used a lot of abbreviations past the surname and given name but
spelled them out here. So for every name I have listed I need an index entry.
By choice I would like to have the colon in the XE to make the surname appear
first and all the given names appear grouped regardless of specific nuclear
family associations. I also do a bold font in the XE for each head of
household so as the reader can quickly find each nuclear family. This works
out well when the original census documents are partially unareadble yielding
Smith, ???? Son 10 Single etc which becomes indexed as { XE "Smith, ????"
}. It also helps when in my examples "Minta" is listed but all the other
local records say Arminta whose father is John and mother is Jane. The colon
insertion into XE also shortens the index making a search for the reader
faster as well.
Here is the good the first census transcription I did was for
22,768 persons times 33 pieces of data of which only the names has to be
indexed. This project was also my first in depth experience with MS Word and
MS Excel. Yes, I did it in Excel first then tranferring to Word. I had no
idea what to do but read help topics quite a bit. So 18,000 XE's is a piece
of cake with shortcut keys and a little extra guidance. I'm going for the
efficent work flow now that I have an idea of what I'm doing.
Again, thanks a million for all your help.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Sounds like you've got it on the run. Making an index like that is a lot of
work no matter how you do it. I worked on a family history with 4,865 index
entries, and the most frustrating thing about it was that the family name
was Link, and the index at some point decided it had had enough Links, and
it wouldn't make them subentries any more. So in the end, after it was all
done, I had to unlink the index and finish the work by hand. <sigh>

 

[Daiya Mitchell]

We also had an experience in MacWord where someone doing a family history
ran into the 18000 limit in for bookmarks in a single documents (if I
remember correctly), and thus the doc acted corrupted.

I believe the problem was that old bookmarks from old TOCs had not been
deleted when the TOC was deleted and recreated, and that this has been
solved in recent versions, but it made me wary of doing genealogy in Word.

 

[Walter P]

Okay, is there any limit on index entries in Word XP? Daiya's post made
me think about a book I'll be doing in 2007. I could easily excede the 22,768
entry figure from my first book. The 2007 project is full of paragraph after
paragraph of names not in column form.
Suzanne, the page down button/F4 worked really well. The colon versus
comma problem is over. A quick proof read of the actual index leads me to
think less than 100 errors exist. Piece of cake!!!!

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Glad I could help.