Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Word 2003

How Word Indexes Work

A quality index is an invaluable tool for helping your readers quickly access the specific information they're looking for—not just in books, but in any document that's long enough to make browsing for specific information inefficient. 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:

1.	Mark your index entries— either one by one or a batch at a time.
2.	Tell Word how to format the index.
3.	Compile the index. (That's the easy part.)

In general, compiling your index should be one of the last things you do with your document. ...