To solve my problem I ended up abandoning tabs and using spaces.

For those interested I have a 126 page Word document that contains names in the text with the first name first. In doing an index I ended up with a 13 page index sorted by first name when I wanted my index sorted by last name.

To accomplish the resorting of the index I copied it to Excel and ended up with the first name, last name and all page numbers for each line of the index in different cells. I then sorted the index in Excel with the last name as the primary sort column and the first name as the secondary sort column. When I copied the resulting index back into Word all the page information was separated by tabs resulting in too much space between the page numbers in the index.

I solved the page number spacing problem by concatenating all the page numbers on each line with spacing between each page number. I then copied the index with the concatenated page numbers into word over the word generated index.