Faster Indexing with Macros

Creating an index using professional indexing programs such as Cindex for Windows, Sky Index, or Macrex often involves pressing a sequence of keys to accomplish some actions. For example, you can choose whether to carry page references forward into new index entries or propagate (repeat) text to new entries. In addition, books often include the same lengthy subject headings a number of times. This article uses Cindex for Windows and a macro program, QuicKeys to show how you can save time and reduce repetitive stress. There are other similar keyboard macro programs.

One of the most helpful features in Cindex is the ability automatically to carry the page locator from one entry forward into the next entry. You may be working on a page with a number of entries. You don't want to have to keep re-keying the page number for each new entry. Setting this option on means the locator automatically will be repeated.

It is a bit time consuming and cumbersome to keep changing this option back and forth. You have to start by clicking on Edit, then on Preferences, followed by the Editing tab in the Preferences window. Then you run the mouse down to the line reading “Carry locators forward” and click on the associated box to either clear it or insert a checkmark. Finally, you press OK to get back to your actual index work. This makes five separate mouse clicks to make one small change. You can reduce this to one or two key presses by using a macro program. This is a 40% reduction in keyboard or mouse use. This may seem tiny, but when you multiply this kind of savings with many other macros, you can get a significant reduction in time and the use of your hands. In one case of an annual index to a massive government publication, with many repeated words and phrases from year to year, creating a number of macros reduced the repetitive typing by 50%.

QuicKeys allows you to assign complicated actions to either a function key or a combination of the Control, Shift, or Alt keys plus a letter or number.

You record a macro that will carry out these steps. QuicKeys once loaded remains in the Systray, the small layer of icons at the bottom right of your screen. When you right click on the QuicKeys icon, you open a window listing various features of QuicKeys. The most important one for our purposes here is an option called "Start recording." Selecting this choice opens up a tiny window. You'll probably want to click and drag this out of the way of your index page, because by default, it appears on the top left of the screen. This window has in it the typical parallel bars triggering a pause in recording or a red box to stop recording. To create the macro, you repeat the sequence of actions described in the preceding paragraph. When finished, click on the Stop button in the QuicKeys window.

A new window appears, asking you to name the new recording sequence. In this case, naming it “Carry locators forward” makes perfect sense. You also assign a hotkey to the macro. This is a combination of a Control, Alternate, or Shift key and a letter or number. You also can also assign one of the function keys to a macro. However, you may want to reserve these for actions that carry out standard operations such as F1 for help. ALT-C is a logical choice for this one, because CTRL-C is used to paste text. The final step is to click on Save & Exit. In the future, all you have to do is press the ALT-C keys to toggle the Carry locators forward option.

For a more complex example, suppose you have made an entry with a subheading. You may want to double-post this—make a separate entry with the heading and subheading reversed. This is easy to do in Cindex with the CTRL-+ key. However, perhaps at other times, you want to create a third entry that not only reverses the heading but also you want the new heading to start with the last word in the previous heading. As a test, you might work out in your mind how many separate key presses or typing you might need to do this. There probably will be at least ten different steps involved. You can accomplish this with a macro using only two keys.

The flexibility of this program, when used in indexing, is limited only by your creativity

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