Locked lesson.
About this lesson
Create an Index organized by topic or keyword.
Lesson versions
Multiple versions of this lesson are available, choose the appropriate version for you:
Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Word documents from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Create an Index.docx60.3 KB Create an Index - Solution.docx
61.5 KB
Quick reference
Create an Index
Learn to create an index organized by topic or keyword
When to use
An index is found at the end of a long document or manuscript and is organized by topic or keyword, generally by alphabet.
Instructions
Mark the Entries that will be used in the Index
- In your document, select any word that you want referenced in the index.
- Click the References Ribbon, Index group.
- Click the Mark Entry button and make any adjustments necessary; generally the default settings work well.
- At the bottom, click Mark or Mark All. Keep in mind, “Mark All” will find every instance of that word. This is a much better option than you having to find them manually.
- Continue on through your document until all the relevant words are marked.
Create the Index
- Go to the bottom of your document and place your insertion point where you want the Index to appear.
- Click the References Ribbon, Index group.
- Click the Insert Index button
- Choose your preferred settings and click OK
- 00:04 In this lesson we're going to create an index.
- 00:07 I've got an image of an index on the screen so you can see where we're headed.
- 00:10 Basically it belongs at the end of the document on the last page of a manuscript,
- 00:14 and it references certain words and what pages they're on.
- 00:17 I'm gonna go ahead and click on that and delete it so we can go ahead and
- 00:21 get started.
- 00:23 On this screen, there's a couple things that are gonna happen.
- 00:26 First of all, I wanna remind you that on the home ribbon,
- 00:29 the show hide button right over here,
- 00:31 that's gonna automatically come on when we start marking these entries.
- 00:34 Don't let it worry you.
- 00:35 You can get in there and turn it off but when the screen changes and
- 00:39 looks a little messy, that's why.
- 00:40 The show hide button's coming on.
- 00:42 It is a two step process to do this.
- 00:44 We first, I'm gonna go ahead and
- 00:46 double-click the word video in the, in this paragraph.
- 00:49 Go to the references ribbon, locate the index group so
- 00:52 you can see there's two steps.
- 00:53 First, we mark entry then and when we're done we'll insert the index.
- 00:59 So I've selected one word, go ahead and clicked mark entry, and
- 01:03 I can see the word right here in the left, it went to the top of my screen.
- 01:07 It entered itself into the main entry so I didn't have to type anything.
- 01:12 A sub-entry simply means I need to clarify it, maybe the main entry is a phrase, and
- 01:16 I need to clarify it in the sub-entry.
- 01:19 I do want a cross reference to the current page it resides on.
- 01:22 I don't need to bold or italicize the number format.
- 01:25 And now I can choose mark or mark all.
- 01:27 It is my personal preference and my suggestion, that you would hit mark all,
- 01:31 because it will find every word in the entire document and
- 01:36 mark it right then and there, so you don't have to chase down and hunt for
- 01:39 these words to mark them individually.
- 01:41 So I'm gonna go ahead and click, Mark All, and
- 01:43 I'm gonna do that every time I select one of these.
- 01:47 Now this little box will stay open.
- 01:50 I'm gonna close it just for
- 01:51 now cuz it's kinda in a way what I wanna demonstrate to you.
- 01:54 But look at this, in the, let's see.
- 01:57 This paragraph right here I have the word theme, and
- 01:59 now in the last paragraph I have the word theme.
- 02:02 Well, I wanna show you how the Mark All will actually go find
- 02:06 if there's a second version of that word on a different page.
- 02:09 To do that, I have to put a page break right here between these paragraphs, okay?
- 02:14 So a page break is control enter on your keyboard.
- 02:17 So I'll push control enter, and
- 02:19 now I can see that I'm on my second page and that word theme is right there.
- 02:24 Now, I'm going to scroll back up to my first page, and we're gonna apply
- 02:26 the theory that, that mark all will definitely find all the words.
- 02:30 I'll go ahead and just double-click this word and
- 02:33 I'll come up to my references ribbon.
- 02:35 Go head and hit mark entry.
- 02:37 Leave everything the same, but right down here I'm going to hit Mark All.
- 02:40 When I click mark all, you can see what happened on my screen in the background.
- 02:45 I'll close this box just for a moment.
- 02:47 Now, I've highlighted this red word theme and I hit Mark All, but look.
- 02:51 It found one before the other one I had highlighted.
- 02:54 So it finds the highest ranking one in the document, the one nearest the top.
- 03:01 And it marks that particular one.
- 03:02 It won't let you leave one behind, basically is what I'm saying.
- 03:05 Now let's go ahead and scroll down to the second page cuz I only marked one of them.
- 03:09 And so, we'll scroll to the second page, and sure enough, there it is.
- 03:13 It's got theme already marked.
- 03:14 Now notice also this little code.
- 03:16 This is the index code that hides behind the document will not print,
- 03:21 it's called a non-printing code.
- 03:23 These are hard returns.
- 03:25 All the polka dots between the words, those are space bars, and
- 03:28 that's all because that paragraph mark is on.
- 03:32 It automatically came on, we didn't do anything.
- 03:35 When we're all done, we'll turn that off.
- 03:35 All right, what I want you to do right now is I want you to pause the video.
- 03:40 I want you to double-click all of these words and I want you to mark the entires.
- 03:45 Okay, you go ahead and do that and then we'll start up.
- 03:47 Hit play when you're done doing that.
- 03:51 Okay, if you've finished, I'm gonna go ahead and close this mark index entry box.
- 03:57 I can see everything is done, and now it's time to insert our index.
- 04:01 You could put this on a separate page, but I'm gonna go ahead and
- 04:04 land it on the same page I'm working on.
- 04:06 So I'll click on my references, come over to my index group, go ahead and
- 04:10 hit insert index, and right here is where you can choose the style of index.
- 04:14 Now right up here, where the formats are, we can save from template but
- 04:18 that doesn't give you my ABC.
- 04:19 You can go ahead and click through these and decide which one you like best.
- 04:24 I happened to like not the simple one.
- 04:26 I think just the formal one I like that one a lot.
- 04:29 I'm going to leave this as indented and
- 04:31 I'm gonna create four columns not just two but four columns cuz they're small and
- 04:36 I'm gonna go ahead and hit OK, and there you will see your index on the screen.
- 04:40 Now because it does look messy, let's go back to our home ribbon,
- 04:43 turn off that Show/Hide button, so we get a nice, clean view of it.
- 04:46 And that folks, is your first index, and that is why you use it.
- 04:50 As you can see, my collapse is on page 2.
- 04:52 The theme right over here is one page 1 and page 2.
- 04:57 And that's why we use an index, to help our readers find our references.
- 05:01 All right?
- 05:02 I hope that helps you.
- 05:03 Thank you.
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.