Creating An Index In Word Document


The longer your document, the more your audience will appreciate an index. As you write, or after you’ve completed your document, you can mark any word in the document that you want to include in the index. Word can then generate the index showing the proper page numbers. If you make changes to the document, you can regenerate the index to keep it accurate.

At first, you might wonder why you have to do all the work of marking every index entry. Word is smart, but it cannot be smart enough to read your mind. (Perhaps that’s a feature being saved for Word 2010.) Word could never know which words you want to include in the index, so it’s up to you to mark each of them. Unlike in the days of old, however, after you mark which words go in the index, your job is over because Word does the work of searching out the page numbers and generating the index.

Locate Text for the Index
Highlight a word or phrase that is to appear in your index.

Mark the Entry
With the index entry selected, click the Mark Entry button on your References ribbon. You can also press Alt+Shift+X to do the same. The Mark Index Entry dialog box appears.

Set Up the Index Entry
Word places your selected text in the Main Entry area of the Mark Index Entry dialog box. You can edit the entry if you want. For example, you may have referred to the same entry in different ways throughout your document, perhaps using an abbreviation such as “CPU” in some places and spelling out the phrase as “central processing unit” elsewhere. In the Main Entry text box, you could change the entry to “CPU - Central Processing Unit,” and as long as you did that everywhere you marked that index entry, one uniform entry will appear in your index for each occurrence of the phrase in your document.

Changing the entry is also useful for proper names you mark in your document that might begin with a first name but that you want to list in your index by last name. For example, if your document refers to Clint Eastwood and you want to place his name in your index, you might change the entry to “Eastwood, Clint.”

Format the Page Numbers
Select Bold or Italic (or both) if you want to format the page number in the index differently from the surrounding page numbers. You might want to do this for proper names.

Generate the Index
After you’ve defined all the entries, you make the request to Word to generate the index. Word compiles the index and places it at the cursor’s current position.

In most cases, this means you will click to place your text cursor (the insertion point) at the end of your document and then click the Insert Index button on your References ribbon.

Word displays the Index dialog box, from which you can select index-formatting options and determine how you want your index to appear. Click OK to generate the index.

Edit Final Index
After your index appears, you can edit the index to adjust formatting, such as the font and spacing, if you need to so that the index matches the format of the rest of the document.