It is surprising that with such a sophisticated program as word, this arrangement has to be done by hand.

The book has 300 pages and 53 sections; as far as I see from my test, this adding of the hyphens by hand will have to be on a section basis i.e. repeated 53 times, times three for the 1st page, and odd and even pages.

I tried typing the hyphen in; it will not allow any space between the hyphen and the page number. Even then it may look ok; there should be an option to have a space between the hyphen and the page number though.

Thanks, I'll try the right align tomorrow. (Not sure where to add the \e " ")

I did use the concordance approach. I'd made a Notepad file containing a list of all the words for the index. Just had to browse to that file in the "References|Insert Index>Automark" as you indicated earlier. There was no two column table. I just browsed to the automark place, it gave me a browser window, I supplied the Notepad file, and when I then clicked on "create index", the index was created.

If your Section headers/footers have the 'same as previous' attribute, you'll only have to do it once for each header or footer for the whole document.
You really shouldn't have any difficulty with that...
Select the Index field, press Shift-F9 to expose the field code, then add the \e " ".
Well, I did refer to a concordance document, and I did say what the table columns were for...

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

My headers/footers do not have the 'same as previous' attribute. Every chapter is different, and within the chapter the 1st page as well as even and odd pages are different. It creates quite a job to add all these hyphens by hand. I will do it. But I would have thought that Word would have provision to allow for automatic hyphenation in the text of the book without having that hyphenation carry over to the index. Hyphens are commonly used for page numbers especially in footers, so it is appropriate that Word has this option to implement it automatically; and yet it is obvious that on one would want that hyphenation to appear in their index.

I tried it again this morning, and it is working indeed. Thank you. Doing it by hand just now, it appears that at least from pages 11-19 the hyphens do not appear perfectly symmetrically arranged (on the left and right of the page number) the way they were when it was done automatically. But it will have to do.

I am a novice at this, please don't mind my foolish questions on this point: I could not understand where the "Index field" is. I went to the actual created index at the back of my document, but there didn't seem to be any fields in it. Are you referring to the "document" you've mentioned below? If so, please see my reply below, as I could not understand where to create that document.

Again, please don't mind my foolishness here, I am a novice at this. When I go to References|Insert Index>Automark, I get a browser window and I browse to my Notepad file containing the word list I created, and it makes the index. Where does this two column table get created?