Building an Index in Publisher 2, is it worth the risk?

[Ryan Clarke]

I have to build an index with a pre-prepared list of 1000 entries. I have tried playing around with the index building tools in Publisher 2, and as I expected they are just as broken and buggy as the ToC controls.

Firstly, why does the index add new entries to the styles and yet the ToC doesn't. The TOC insists that you click within the ToC to get to the styles, which is incredibly annoying. The index doesn't. And yet it creates a list of unfathomable style entries. What is the purpose of all these? Why can't it just add one and let me build my own?

Especially as the default style is a mess, with overspaced entries. It even adds A, B, C, D. Seriously? I don't have a single book that adds the alphabet into the index. How do I get rid of them because I can find no setting for it?

What do all these strange glyphs mean in between items. They appear as default, and Publisher doesn't seem to have anywhere I can decode them.

And lastly, I tried formatting the index styles as soon as I created it. Just like the ToC, it would not do anything. I had to refresh the TOC to see my changes. I can get some of the styles to change some of the time, but this is not looking good.

I really don't fancy my chances of sitting here for a week trying to build a 1000 entry index with Publisher. The ToC has caused enough problems and continues to do so. I'm fairly sure the index tools are just as broken.

Is there any other reliable tool I could use to build an index where I could then import it in some way into Publisher?

[MikeTO]

21 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

I have to build an index with a pre-prepared list of 1000 entries. I have tried playing around with the index building tools in Publisher 2, and as I expected they are just as broken and buggy as the ToC controls.

Actually, the index feature works great. The number one complaint that people have is that they can insert only one index. There are other bells and whistles that people would like but what is there works well and is not buggy.

21 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

Firstly, why does the index add new entries to the styles and yet the ToC doesn't. The TOC insists that you click within the ToC to get to the styles, which is incredibly annoying. The index doesn't. And yet it creates a list of unfathomable style entries. What is the purpose of all these? Why can't it just add one and let me build my own?

I have explained what each of the index styles are for in my manual.

I wish that the index styles were hidden when I'm not editing an index, they definitely get in the way. But I think it's great that Publisher creates the index styles for us - it would be much harder for new users to build their first index if Publisher didn't generate all the required styles automatically.

21 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

It even adds A, B, C, D. Seriously? I don't have a single book that adds the alphabet into the index. How do I get rid of them because I can find no setting for it?

If you don't want them, deselect "Include Section Headings" in the Index panel.

21 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

What do all these strange glyphs mean in between items. They appear as default, and Publisher doesn't seem to have anywhere I can decode them.

I also included a list of all of these default values in the Index section of my manual (see Labels and Separators in step 5).

These are also the same symbols used for showing special characters so you can refer to my free Special Characters chart, too.

21 hours ago, Ryan Clarke said:

And lastly, I tried formatting the index styles as soon as I created it. Just like the ToC, it would not do anything. I had to refresh the TOC to see my changes. I can get some of the styles to change some of the time, but this is not looking good.

I'm unable to duplicate this issue and I haven't seen other users report a similar issue. Updating an index paragraph or character style immediately updates the index.

Edited September 26 by MikeTO
fixed spelling mistake