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[Solved] Index entry mistake and am now flooded with "fire"

Posted: Thu May 23, 2019 7:41 pm
by magnoliasouth
I have a public domain book that I am transcribing and indexing. When I first started I had to follow the tutorial about indexing and it went fine until I made a mistake and now I cannot figure out how to fix it. This book is the history of an old Texas town straight out of the Old West. I'm a genealogist and am interested in this book's value, due to its locations, descriptions, people and the like. It's a genealogical gold mine.

There were a couple of historic fires. I indexed the word Fire to index the ones mentioned. The problem is that at some point it asked me a question and at that very moment, I knocked over my coffee cup and pressed a button jumping for it and now I have an issue where Fire is indexed on just about every page. It looks to me like it's indexed for every stinking period I have in this 70 page book!

Is there an easy way to remove that? Or other errors? Most entries were done wrong the first time around and editing the index is turning out to be a horrible experience. It doesn't want to listen to me, when I insert an entry (for example) for Smith, John and prefers to index it as John Smith. I understand why, in the book he is listed as John Smith and not Smith, John. However, after fiddling with it over and over again, it snaps back to John Smith.

Is there a way that I can simply edit the Index itself? How do I get rid of Fire? Or should I just start the hell all over again, which is disappointing? The problem with that is that the text is only in one document and if I copy paste into a new document won't that also copy the index? I've spent many hours already working on it and it doesn't appear to be working as effortlessly, as I had hoped. lol!

Any help is appreciated.

Re: Index entry mistake and am now flooded with "fire" et al

Posted: Thu May 23, 2019 8:40 pm
by RoryOF
There is some discussion on index entries and their removal in
viewtopic.php?f=7&t=56763

Best to try this on a copy of your file in case there is a catastrophe!

Re: Index entry mistake and am now flooded with "fire" et al

Posted: Wed May 29, 2019 12:29 am
by magnoliasouth
Thank you! I was disappointed to see that I had to first delete each and every entry in the original doc and you are absolutely correct in making copies of docs before editing. It's a rule that I never break and the one time I do... Anyway, I fixed it. I went through and deleted each entry then saved to a new file. Now that I get how to do it, it's going much more smoothly. I just wish that there could be a one-button "remove all indices" option. It took forever to delete all of those entries and I even kept the dialog open too. I clicked next each time and it was nearly an hour to just quick delete them all.

Thanks for your input!