One of the trends in documentation that's bothered me over the years is the move away from indexing to just using search. While search can be useful in an online document, it's no substitute for a carefully crafted index. Unfortunately, indexes are time-consuming and take some thought, and they're often the first thing to get dropped when deadlines loom.
The other problem is that popular writing tools don't make indexing easy or intuitive. (Are you listening, Adobe?) I will give credit to Microsoft in this regard; Word's indexing tool is relatively easy to use, and has some features that aren't obvious from a first glance at the interface.
Office Watch has published a good article that covers Word's indexing in detail. It's worth a look if you use Word and have to index a document.
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