Thanks for your feedback, Ken!
On checking my post in the cold light of a Canberra autumn morning, I
<blush> find that in personalizing my index for your situation I omitted a
double quotation mark from the code for the "see also" index entry. It
should have been:
{ XE "Microsoft, See also " \t "Word; Excel; Power Point" \i }
I then made a very thorough check of my post and found a number of other
errors (I had wanted to get back to you promptly, but in hindsight I should
not have sent my response before doing a more thorough check, since it was
new material). Here they are:
Two spaces after XE are unnecessary (this error will have occurred aeons ago
via "Smart cut and paste").
It's necessary to select and italicize the last 3 words in the above example
if you want them to be italicized in the index.
My reference to the \t switch was wrong. This is the correct situation (look
up "Field codes: XE (Index Entry) field" in Help if you want more):
\t inserts the text in place of a page number.
\i makes the entry's page number italic, but because there is no page number
in these there is no reason to have \i in a "see also" entry.
You need to switch on dumb quotes before you type the index codes (so I
needed to say this at the beginning).
Finally, removing the comma between the last word in indexed terms and the
first page numbers, via the Search and Replace facility, has to be done
manually -- otherwise it will remove the commas between numbers.
I'm sorry for misleading you. This *does* typify what all of us find when
indexing: that it takes time to shake down the way it's done, albeit the
smooth operation afterwards is a compensation.
I have re-written the notes with these amendments in, below.
Thanks for asking this question -- it induced me to write up this topic,
which I hadn't done previously because I'm always so busy at the time of the
year when I do the huge once-a-year indexing job. Now I won't have to
re-learn everything!
I might put these notes eventually in "Bend Word to Your Will" (this is a
Word document containing notes on the way I use Word for the Mac, titled
"Bend Word to Your Will", which is available as a free download from the
Word MVPs' website (
http://word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/Bend/BendWord.htm)).
Hmm, it's 9 hours too early for a gin and tonic. Maybe some orange juice...
Cheers,
Clive Huggan
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QUESTION
I am inserting an index into a document. I Want a "see also" subentry with
multiple titles and want NO page numbers. How do I do that? For example: I
would like the index entry to read:
Microsoft 5, 22, 34
See also: Word; Excel; Power Point
ANSWER
Before doing what's in the following paragraphs I switch off "Smart quotes"
in Tools menu -> AutoCorrect -> AutoFormat as you type and switch off Smart
cut and paste (in Word 2004 it's Word menu -> Preferences -> Edit).
On pages 5, 22 and 34 I have the index entry { XE "Microsoft" } (note the
spaces).
On one of those pages (for convenient reference later I usually put it next
to the first entry, i.e. page 5 in this case) I put a "see also" index
entry:
{ XE "Microsoft, See also " \t "Word; Excel; Power Point" }
I select and italicize the last three words in this entry.
That produces, in the index:
Microsoft, 5,22,34
Microsoft, See also. Word; Excel; PowerPoint <==last 3 words are italicized
A few explanations:
1. The reason I put "Microsoft" in the "see also" index entry is to
position this entry next to the one that shows the page numbers.
2. I manually delete "Microsoft, " thereby leaving the index reading:
Microsoft, 5,22,34
See also. Word; Excel; PowerPoint
When I'm finally satisfied with the index that has been generated (which as
we all know will take a few iterations), I correct two other things:
3. I don't want the comma after "Microsoft", so I click at the start of the
index and initiate a Find for [comma space] and Replace it with a space
(don't click on "Replace all" or this will delete the commas between
numbers).
4. I don't want the full stop after "also" so I initiate a Find and Replace
to replace "also." with "also"
The index now reads:
Microsoft 5,22,34
See also Word; Excel; PowerPoint
If you find indexing a pain (I do, but I have to do one per year on a
complex job with deadlines too tight to farm it out), you may be interested
in some other things I do to make things much easier and quicker:
Having originally looked up "Create an index" in Help, and having gone to
the topic "Format index entries as you mark them", I found the procedure too
lengthy. So I decided to copy one index entry and to put it in its own
paragraph, placing it immediately above the paragraph in which the words to
be indexed appear, where I could easily see them and sort them. I copied
this paragraph for future use, thus avoiding the laborious procedure
described in Help.
I assigned a paragraph style for these paragraphs containing index entries,
which incorporates spacing (leading), hidden text etc, and a blue font
colour to makes it easier to see where an index entry is (and since my
indexing often has alternative terms for the same concept, which do not
appear in the text but only in the index, I often want to sort these entries
-- but many indexing tasks don't require this).
I assign a red font colour to the "see also" entries to distinguish them
from the ordinary index entries both in the main body of the document and in
the compiled index.
I paste into a separate new document -- that has been reduced to the
smallest size possible and parked in a convenient position -- a sample of
both types of paragraphs for index entries, but without any terms in them.
When in the main document I come to where I need to have, say, a "see also"
entry after I've been doing a few ordinary index entries, I click on this
document, select the "see also" index entry paragraph, and copy it. I then
paste it into the main document. Then I select and Option-drag the word I
want to index, from the main body text into this index entry paragraph. It
automatically becomes hidden text, blue etc because the style takes over.
Having switched off "smart cut and paste", a space isn't formed -- spaces in
the entries will index separately from those without.
The procedure in the preceding paragraph saves a huge amount of time in
indexing.
The colour in the index entries carries over to the compiled index, where
it's again easier to see the "see also" comment. I remove the colour after
the index has been compiled and shaken down.
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