Special Edition Using Microsoft® Word 2000

How Word Indexes Work

Word's indexing features are intended to automate those aspects of indexing that a computer is smart enough to do on its own, and streamline those for which there's no substitute for your human judgment.

Building an index with Word is a three-step process. First, you mark your index entries—either one by one, or a batch at a time. Next, you tell Word which types of entries to include in your index and how to format the index. Then there's the easy part—actually compiling the index.

Note

In general, compiling your index should be one of the last things you do with your document. Indexing last reduces the number of times you have to rebuild your index. It also tends to increase the quality of your index because you have access ...