How do I build an index without entering one word at a time

[Edwin]

In Word 2003, you could create a file with two columns, one with the word in
the text that was going to be marked and the other with the index word. Thus
you might have 'voting' and 'parliament' under the index word 'democracy'.
and this is what you would put in the second column. This facility seems to
be missing from Word 2007. I cannot find it in Help at all. Has it been
lost or is there still some way of merging a column file with the text to be
indexed and marking up in this way?

 

[Jay Freedman]

The function still operates the same way, except for how you get there.
After you create the file (which everyone else calls a "concordance file"
but Microsoft calls an "automark file"), open the document to be indexed, go
to the References tab of the ribbon, and click the Insert Index button. In
the dialog, click the AutoMark button and choose the concordance file. (You
might expect this button to be on the Mark Entry dialog, but it isn't.)

Word 2007's help apparently contains no information about this feature, or
at least none that can be found. You might be interested in this passage
from "Word 2007: The Missing Manual":
http://books.google.com/books?id=oV...ook_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CBoQ6AEwBA

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP
Email cannot be acknowledged; please post all follow-ups to the newsgroup so
all may benefit.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

FWIW, Word 2003 includes the following as part of the "Create an index" Help
topic:

Automatically mark entries by using a concordance file
1. Create a concordance file.
How?

1. Click Insert Table on the Standard toolbar.
2. Drag to select two columns.
3. In the first column, enter the text you want Microsoft Word to
search for and mark as an index entry. Make sure to enter the text exactly
as it appears in the document. Then press TAB.
4. In the second column, type the index entry for the text in the first
column. Then press TAB. If you want to create a subentry, type the main
entry followed by a colon ) and the subentry.
5. Repeat steps 3 and 4 for each index reference and entry.
6. Save the concordance file.
Tips

a. To make sure Word marks all the text you want to index, list all
forms of the text you want to search for. For example, type erupt, erupting,
and eruption in three separate cells in the left column, and then type
volcanoes in the matching cells in the right column.
b. To speed up the creation of a concordance file, first open both the
concordance file and the document you want to index. To see both documents
at once, click Arrange All on the Window menu. Then copy text from the
document you want to index into the first column of the concordance file.
2. Open the document you want to index.
3. On the Insert menu, point to Reference, click Index and Tables, and
then click the Index tab.
4. Click AutoMark.
5. In the File name box, enter the name of the concordance file you want
to use.
6. Click Open.
Word searches through the document for each exact occurrence of text in the
first column of the concordance file, and then it uses the text in the
second column as the index entry. Word marks only the first occurrence of an
entry in each paragraph.

Note Microsoft Word inserts each marked index entry as an XE (Index Entry)
field in hidden text format. If you don't see the XE fields, click Show/Hide
on the Standard toolbar.

--
Suzanne S. Barnhill
Microsoft MVP (Word)
Words into Type
Fairhope, Alabama USA
http://word.mvps.org