Computer Application, Maintenance and Supplies

Sunday, April 04, 2010

Indexes and Contents Pages

Manually putting together a table of contents or index ­ or both ­ for printed documents can be tedious. Picking out page numbers for chapter headings is easy enough, but cataloguing key words on every page is a huge task. Things get trickier still if the original text is edited, when even the smallest change can result in the document being repaginated. Microsoft Word not only makes light work of collating contents pages and indexes, but it will also keep track of page numbers automatically ­ no matter how often the pagination changes. Here’s how to get started in Word 2003.


Start Microsoft Word and open a document to work with (we’re using War and Peace, which can be downloaded from www.gutenberg.org/etext/2600). To generate a table of contents (ToC), the document’s section headings must be formatted as Word Styles. For War and Peace, we will format each book title as Heading 1 and each chapter heading as Heading 2. To apply a heading style, highlight the appropriate text and choose a Heading style from the Style dropdown menu. Don’t worry about the appearance of the formatting ­ it can be changed later (by opening the Format menu and choosing Styles and Formatting).

With the document section headings formatted, move the text cursor to the start of the document and press Ctrl and Return on the keyboard to insert a blank page. Position the cursor somewhere on this blank page (Word will insert a ToC at the current cursor position) then open the Insert menu, point to Reference then click Index and Tables. When the dialogue box appears, click the Table of Contents tab. These options control the ToC’s appearance. The default settings are fine for most purposes, but check out the various ToC styles on the Formats dropdown menu under the General section.

Click OK to generate a table of contents at the current cursor position. This can take a few seconds for a long document. The ToC is text and can be manually formatted and edited, if required. If the main document is edited and the pagination changes, though, just click somewhere in the ToC to highlight it, then press the F9 key to update the contents. Word will ask whether it should update just the page numbers or the entire table, which is useful if you have added more entries since creating the original table.

Indexes in Word work like a ToC, but use text that has been marked manually rather than text with a certain style. Highlight some text in the document and press Alt and Shift and X to open the Mark Index Entry dialogue box. Word uses the highlighted text as the Main entry in the index –­ click the Mark button to accept this. Alternatively, click Mark All to index all occurrences of the highlighted text. In either case, Word will insert a hidden index reference in the document and switch to its non-printing characters view (so you can see it). To turn off the non-printing characters view, just click the paragraph mark symbol on the main Word toolbar.

To create an index sub-entry (an entry under a more general heading, such as ‘Recurring characters’), copy the text for the sub-entry (or be ready to type it manually), then highlight the text for its general heading and press Alt and Shift and X. The highlighted text will appear as the Main entry, so just paste (or type) the sub-entry text in the Subentry box. Use the same technique for cross-references. Select the Cross-reference option before pasting or typing the text in the Cross-reference box.

Entries can be added to the index at any time. Close the dialogue box when finished. Put the cursor on a blank page at the end of the document (use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl and Return to insert a page break), then open the Insert menu, point to Reference and click Index and Tables. The default options on the Index tab should suit most indexes, though the ‘Right align page numbers’ option is worth selecting. Click the OK button and the index will be created on the current page. As with a ToC, pressing the F9 key updates the page numbers and/or entries in the index (see paragraph 3).

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