Microsoft Word 2003 - Two tier index repeates same top tier.

[Warren Postm4]

I have an auto-generated index, and here is a sample of how it looks:

Banana ....
Orange ...
Banana ....
Pear ...
Banana ....
Steve....

I would like only one top level index heading:

Banana ....
Orange ...
Pear ...
Steve ...

I would have thought that Word would do this automatically. I have carefully
checked the XE entries, and the typing of "Banana:Orange" and "Banana:Steve"
both use the same first entry (Banana). But they appear three times in the
index, each with one item underneath, instead of with one combined top level
heading, and the three entries underneath it.

I opened it up in Office 2010 Word beta to see if it works better here, and
it does the same thing. I regenerated a new Index field into the document,
and it does it there too. I am stumped. I even did a search-replace with
Banana and replaced it with Apple, and it found and replaced all text and XE
entries, but my manual (which is not about fruit, but I figured I wouldn't
bore you all with technical terms that have nothing to do with my question)
index is totally full of duplicates like this. In other places, I have cases
where Word is working as expected. There is a space character in between
two words in all cases where it isn't working, and yet I know it's not some
other weird unicode character that looks like a space. I even took the spaces
out and changed them to dash (-) characters, and I get the same problem.
Then I changed them to a single letter (x) and it still happens. Word is
trying to make me lose all my remaining hair follicles, I think.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I have seen this, and I never did figure out what was wrong. In my case, as
in yours, there was absolutely nothing wrong with the XE fields. I ended up
just unlinking the index and fixing it manually after editing was complete,
but I suspect that probably the document was corrupt. If that is the case
with yours, you may be able to repair it using Word's built-in Repair option
or the instructions at http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/AppErrors/CorruptDoc.htm.

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

 

[Peter T. Daniels]

Be sure the Bananas are _absolutely identical -- no spaces, no
diacritics, maybe even no formatting differences. Try copying one of
the XE fields and replacing all the others with it, then typing the
second-level items again.

 

[Suzanne S. Barnhill]

I can attest, though, that sometimes you can do all of those things and
still have the problem.

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

Be sure the Bananas are _absolutely identical -- no spaces, no
diacritics, maybe even no formatting differences. Try copying one of
the XE fields and replacing all the others with it, then typing the
second-level items again.