Hands on: Index words and their entries

If you tried your hand at indexing in Open/Star Office or Word, you may have come across concordance files.

The definition of a concordance is ‘an alphabetical arrangement of the principal words contained in a book, with citations of the passages in which they occur’. In word processing parlance, a concordance file is a list of the words you want indexed and their index entries.

To create a concordance file in Word, start a new document and insert a two-column table. In the left column type the words you want indexed and in the right the index entry.

The former is case-sensitive, so you may need to create lines for, say, ‘Wizard’ and ‘wizard’, both pointing at the ‘Wizard’ index entries. You can use this to encompass word-forms.

To create sub-entries in the index, separate them with a colon in the right-hand column, eg, ‘Caesar:Julius’.

Having created and saved your concordance file as a doc, open the file you want to index. Go to Insert, Reference, Index and Tables, then select the Index tab.

Click on the AutoMark button and a file browser will appear – select the concordance file that you created and click Open. Without any prompting, all the index entries in the main document will be entered automatically – you’ll see them as {XE…} field codes.

Now go to the end of the document and create the Index itself – return to the Index tab of Indexes and Tables, select the options you want and click OK.

A little bit of sophistication
Star Office and Open Office have a more sophisticated system. Although you can create a file from scratch, there are built-in facilities – go to Insert, Indexes and Tables, Indexes and Tables and choose Alphabetical Index from the Type box.

Tick the Concordance file box, then click the File button beside this to create a new concordance file. Each line in the file can have up to seven fields, like this:

Search term;Alternative entry; 1st key;2nd key;Comment;Match case;Word only

The search term is what you want indexed in the text. The first key is what will appear in the index, with the second key as a sub-entry.

The Alternative entry will also appear as a sub-entry. If ‘Match case’ and ‘Word only’ are left blank, or set to zero the index will not be case sensitive or look for whole words only.

You don’t have to use all this – if you just type a word in the Search term column, it will be indexed as such.