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.docx63.3 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 If you've ever wanted to write a cookbook or any other manual,
- 00:08 of course at the very end you're going to need an index.
- 00:10 And on the screen, I have a picture of what an index would look like.
- 00:14 What we're going to do is actually create an index from the text that's on
- 00:18 the exercise file.
- 00:19 So I'm gonna go ahead and click on this and delete that real quick.
- 00:22 So you can see that all the red words on this screen are going to be in the index,
- 00:26 all right?
- 00:27 So first of all, in order to create an index,
- 00:31 mark an index entry, the code is ALT + SHIFT + X.
- 00:35 And to create an index is ALT + S + X.
- 00:37 Now this is if you're going to be using this a lot.
- 00:40 And generally when it comes to time to use or to create an index,
- 00:43 you'll want to know those codes.
- 00:45 But in the mean time, you're new to this, you go to the references ribbon.
- 00:49 Right over here there's an entire group that says Index and you can mark
- 00:52 entry individually or go ahead and just even start with the Insert Index.
- 00:57 I'm gonna go ahead and start there just to show you what happens.
- 01:00 When I and click Insert Index, up comes a nice little format.
- 01:03 I can choose which kind of format I want.
- 01:06 I'm going to stay with the classic, but
- 01:08 you have all of these other ones you can choose as well.
- 01:10 Bulleted indexes or whatever, but I'll go with classic.
- 01:13 You can tell it how many columns you want, two or three columns.
- 01:17 And right down here we have Mark Entry and AutoMark.
- 01:20 So the AutoMark, if I clicked that it would go find another document and
- 01:25 AutoMark all the settings I've already set up.
- 01:28 Or I'm just going to go ahead and click Mark Entry right here, just so
- 01:30 you can see what happens next.
- 01:33 It opens up this little box.
- 01:35 Now this box that opened would be the same as going to references in the background
- 01:39 and the Mark Entry button.
- 01:40 You're gonna get the same box.
- 01:41 Now alls I have to do is double-click any word on my screen,
- 01:46 activate the mark entry box.
- 01:47 It puts that word in there.
- 01:49 A sub entry would be simply to clarify a little note in italics under it.
- 01:54 I want it to cross reference to the current page that it's residing on.
- 01:58 I can bold or italicize and I can go ahead and hit mark.
- 02:01 Now the hard thing is just going through and
- 02:04 finding all the words you want to mark.
- 02:05 That's why I've got them already red, so colored red.
- 02:08 So I double-click the word,
- 02:11 activate the box which doesn't go away by the way, which is really a nice feature.
- 02:15 So I don't have to go get it every single time I make any adjustments and hit mark.
- 02:20 Now sometimes there's going to be multiple words in there.
- 02:23 For instance, I've got the word, let's see theme.
- 02:26 I've got it in here a couple of times.
- 02:27 I've got the word video, so if I double-click the word theme,
- 02:31 activate that one, click into the box, it has the word theme.
- 02:35 This time, I can mark all, and it's gonna go find all of them and mark them all and
- 02:39 put them on the same page.
- 02:41 Now, you're gonna say, well, why didn't it put a mark on that one?
- 02:44 Because there was, sorry, here, let me just close that for a moment.
- 02:49 The word theme was right above it, see?
- 02:50 It was right here.
- 02:51 It wasn't even red, but it found it.
- 02:53 I mark to this one, it's going to know.
- 02:55 It marked one of them and it's gonna find all the ones that come behind it, okay?
- 02:59 So for instance, let me show you again.
- 03:00 I've got video here, this word video.
- 03:04 And I've got another word video behind it, okay?
- 03:06 So it's gonna mark this one, but not this one,
- 03:09 when I do the Mark All, cuz it's gonna include them on the same page.
- 03:12 So don't worry too much about it, it will find them all.
- 03:15 So I hit Mark Entry, there's my video, I hit Mark All, and
- 03:19 when I close that, you can see exactly what happens.
- 03:21 The one I had highlighted didn't get the code on it, but the one before it did.
- 03:25 And believe me it knows exactly what it's doing.
- 03:27 It's going to find them all.
- 03:29 If you don't trust it, then you can test it.
- 03:31 But right now what I'm going to do, cuz there's so much in here,
- 03:34 I'm going to pause my video.
- 03:35 And I'm gonna mark all of them and I will be right back.
- 03:41 Okay, I've got them all marked and it looks very busy in the background.
- 03:45 So I'm gonna go ahead and close my Mark box and
- 03:47 show you something else that happened.
- 03:49 What happened was all codes are showing, all the hardware terms are showing,
- 03:52 all the polka dots between the words, which are space bars are showing.
- 03:55 Cuz when you go into an advanced level like this,
- 03:57 it automatically turns on the Hhow/hide button.
- 04:00 Now if I turn that off, it collapses them all, you don't see any of the codes, but
- 04:03 that's okay.
- 04:04 It's kind of nice to leave that on while you're working in here.
- 04:08 All right, I do have a note to insert a page break here cuz I want you to see
- 04:11 that when we do our index, it will actually go to and
- 04:15 show that all these words in this paragraph are on the next page.
- 04:18 So I'm gonna press Ctrl+ enter right here.
- 04:21 And now right here, this is where I'm gonna insert my index.
- 04:23 So I'm gonna go to References.
- 04:26 I'm gonna click on Insert Index.
- 04:28 Now I already chose my classic view, but again,
- 04:31 you can change your formats if you want.
- 04:33 And then right over here, I'm gonna click OK.
- 04:35 I've chosen two columns.
- 04:37 Click OK and there you go.
- 04:39 There is the index in the classic format.
- 04:42 Maybe you like that, maybe you don't.
- 04:44 It's all right to go ahead and change it, remember?
- 04:46 It is a field.
- 04:47 See, when I click on it, it's a field.
- 04:49 And I can Ctrl + click any of these.
- 04:51 And, well, it's not taking me to where they're at, but because it is a field
- 04:55 I can go to Update Index or I can again change the index to a different format.
- 05:00 Maybe, let's see, let's go to modern and hit OK.
- 05:03 There we have the modern format and yes, I want to change it.
- 05:07 It's all under your control so have fun with this and use it.
- 05:11 It's pretty great feature.
- 05:12 Thank you
Lesson notes are only available for subscribers.