How to make an index in Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010? step by step guide

Currently, for any user, be it a university student, a professional or a housewife, it is important to handle certain tools that come with Microsoft Word, which make your life easier at the time of making a document. One of these are the indexes, which are ideal for displaying the content of the work in an orderly and logical way, providing an elegance and professionalism that are very pleasing to the eye.

Word is a powerful word processor of the Microsoft Office Suiteis a program that allows you to do many things and among them a table of contents, commonly called an index, which is very useful to obtain the organization of the document, or for the user to have a reference when accessing the information , since you can visualize the structure of the text by chapters, title and subtitles and that definitely helps the reader.

In this sense, in this tutorial, we will teach you how to how to create an index in microsoft 2007 and 2010 through very explicit, simple and practical illustrations, so that from the very moment you can prepare the table of contents of any document, whether as a thesis, university papers or organization manuals. The novelty of this guide is that you will learn to do it in both ways: manually and automatically.

Steps to make an index in Microsoft Word 2007 and 2010

Text tables can be generated in two ways and you will learn how to do it both ways in this tutorial. It is an extremely simple process that you can even do without much knowledge thanks to the intuitive interface of the software. But to make things even easier for you, we will show you step by step how to do each of them.

Generate index automatically

The advantage of doing it with Microsoft Word is that once the index is created, if we add more content to the document, the index will be updated directly.

• Create an index or table of contents in Word, for that you must set the title, subtitles and any division in the textfor this tutorial we elaborated an example text with a title and three subtitles.
• Here you have to select the titles in order of importance, for example you must click on which one is going to be Title I, Title II and so on. You do that in the headings section.

• If you don’t like the font options your titles have been changed to after formatting them with Headingyou can change them by shading the text and clicking the right mouse button and selecting “Modify”.
• Then a new window will appear, and this is where you choose the style that you like the most.
• Insert the page numbering. you stand in the insert menuthen look for the “Page number” option and choose the one that best suits your needs.

• Then it takes you to the menu “page design”there located on the left side the “table of Contents” and choose the design that you like the most and finally click insert table of contents.

• Then a new window appears with the view table preview and then click accept. The result will be the index with its respective numbering perfectly generated.

Create table of contents manually

This is another way to do the index. For this you must set tab stops in the ruler when the document is opened.

• If by any chance the horizontal ruler does not appear, scroll to the tab “Watch” and check the box “Rule”.

• Once you see the horizontal ruler, create a tab stop click on the position that the page numbers of the sections of your table of contents will occupy (it is styled to be 14 cm). Next, double-click on that tab stop to display the window tabulations.

• Check that the alignment is to the right and then select the filler characters that the word processor will expose between each entry and the page number. click on To accept to return to your document.
• Then, write the name of your first entry (for example, here I used Introduction) and press the TAB key. After, write the page number and touch the key Enter. You are going to repeat this step for each new entry you want to make (for the tutorial, place Background, Objectives and structure).
• Done, you have the choice manual to make the table of contentsI hope the information has been useful to you.