How to "tag" words in Word ? (Hidden tags for searching)

[Will]

Is it possible to embed a hidden tag on a word or group of words in Word?

Such that we can search for the tagged word or phrase... even after we edit
text and it moves around.

We wanted to do this for key words that appear in the index of a draft copy.

We need to do the index now but know that text may move around later with
editing and want to be able to find the tagged word easily so that we can
correct the page numbers in the index when everything is done. (No we can't
wait till it is all done to do the index on this project.)

We can not just search for the word as it may appear many times in the text
and only one or two of those will likely show up in the index.

Maybe there is a better way to do this ??? If so please advise.

Thanks for any help.

 

[CyberTaz]

Hello-

Before you get deluged by a litany of options, may I ask why you are not
using the Index features of Word rather than trying to build an index
manually? If you use Word's Index & Tables feature your index can be updated
as necessary and the correct page numbers don't have to be searched for and
edited.

Regards |:>)

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

You could bookmark the word, but I'm curious about the reason you give.
Surely you don't intend to prepare the index by hand?! Word can do this for
you. See http://word.mvps.org/faqs/formatting/Createindex.htm

 

[Will]

Our intention was to have the author highlight the index words in the text
and note the current page number.

Then, depending on the response of this email, preceed as appropriate.

I had read the article you referenced a few months ago and it made the
operation seem less than straight forward.

We will have a 100 to 300 terms in our index and after re-reading the
article you reference the manual method is looking more and more attractive.

It seems the "Mark-up" method is the one to consider but in "Indexing Made
Easy" ...

- What does "Levels of entry" mean?
- If we are indexing to key words why worry about "reversing the terms" ?
- In fact I don't think I really understand one single instruction in
Indexing Made Easy section 2
- Maybe it will become clear after "dinking" around with it for a few hours
but...

We could simply highlight the Indexed words and just before printing...
split the screen, search for the highlighted words, and type in the page
numbers in the bottom of the split screen.

Clearly, I must be missing something here.

But, thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Generally, speaking, inserting an index entry is as simple as selecting
(highlighting) a term and pressing Alt+Shift+X, OK. That works for simple
words, but let's consider some other possibilities:

If you want the name "George Washington" to appear in the index, you can
select that and create an index entry, but of course what you really want in
the index is "Washington, George," so you need to edit the entry text to
reflect that.

Or perhaps you have several Washingtons and want to group them:

Washington
Booker T.
George
Martha

In that case you have to create the entry as Washington:George, where
Washington is the main entry and George the subentry. The same would be true
if you wanted, say, apple, pear, and pineapple to appear under the category
of "fruit."

The advantage to doing this (and especially to teaching the author how to do
it) is that, once you have inserted your XE fields and Index field, you can
move text around as much as you want, and every time you print the document,
the index will be updated to reflect the current page numbers. The advantage
of teaching the author to do this is that the author probably has a better
idea than you do of the desired taxonomy of the index--not just what's
important but how it should be listed. Merely tagging words in some way is
not as effective as providing the actual index entry that should appear. For
example, there could be a main index entry for George Washington with
subentries for "childhood," "truthfulness," "at Valley Forge," "crossing the
Delaware," etc., even though these exact words may not be found in the text.

The method you suggest sounds extremely labor-intensive for 100-300 terms. I
shudder to consider the idea of searching for words and typing numbers into
a split screen. Aggh!

 

[Will]

Suzanne,

Thank you for taking the time to give me a little tutorial.

Your explination was much more useful than the referenced Microsoft article.

Will

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

Help, even when it is strong on "how," doesn't always explain "why."