Let me start by saying this: indexing is perhaps the most underdeveloped feature of Microsoft Word.




A friend has to index an entire book (120 000 words) and it's going super slow. Can you guys help us out with a thing or two, and is there an alternative to this tedious process (without having to pay someone thousands of dollars)?


My friend has to edit a phrase in the index itself (say, "farmers from Arizona" to "farmers in Arizona"), but this means he has to edit every single indexed instance of this phrase in the text by itself. Can't you just edit the phrase and keep the indexing the same??


Is there a reliable (preferably free or cheap) alternative to Word indexing that has this type of problems sorted out? You have a dozen of great free citation machines out there but no indexing software?

First, machine indexing is not, in any program I know of, a substitute for a human being doing the index. That said...
Search and Replace works very well in Word. Ctrl+H
It can replace things in Index entries as well as in the main text.

Thanks for the tip, it works!