"Index" versus "Table of Contents"

[ChrisGreaves]

If you had any generosity in you at all, you would concede that i was right about computing technology half the time, the other half, well ...

Into my mail box popped a Google Digest about Indexing - a pet project of mine since around 1993.

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The link sends me off to How to make an index in Word easily - my area of expertise, as it turns out - and so I read the article and soon become aware that the technical expert isn't talking about an "index" as MSWord understands it, but a simple "table of contents'.
Any discussion about making an Index in MSWord easily has to include the word "concordance".

This level of ignorance has me reaching for my quill and inkpot, but then I decide not to. The author is clearly searching for some topic about which he/she/it can write, thereby appearing to be an expert without really having earned the right. What does such a writer care about facts?

The first thing I learn is that I should be skeptical about any unknown-to-me technical writer's platform

The second thing I learn is that a link to an article by one of my peers in a site (such as Eileen's Lounge) that I have come to trust over the years, is worth reading, with a modicum of skepticism.

The third thing I learn is that a link to an article by one of my peers in a site (such as Eileen's Lounge) that I have come to trust over the years, is worth reading, with a modicum of skepticism, and if the item is of critical importance to my work, I would do well to allow three or four days discussion to take place before placing my faith in the linked article.


Cheers, Chris

[HansV]

Tech-not-so-Smart?

[Charles Kenyon]

In at least some non-English languages, a TOC translates as Index.
Or, at least, that has been my impression answering questions in these forums. I have seen a number of non-English-speaking posters who ask about something to do with an Index when they are talking about a TOC. Italian comes to mind.

[ChrisGreaves]

In at least some non-English languages, a TOC translates as Index.
Or, at least, that has been my impression answering questions in these forums. I have seen a number of non-English-speaking posters who ask about something to do with an Index when they are talking about a TOC. Italian comes to mind.

Hello Charles, and yes, my version of French, in the spoken form let alone the written form, leaves much, as they say, to be desired. Indeed I am surprised that my passport isn't stamped with "Do not allow this guy to try to speak French ...".
That said, the thrust of my rant is that this is a technical article written about "Indexes in Microsoft Word", and that someone posing as an expert, writing on a subject, ought to use the correct terms.

Imagine some non-English speaker struggling through documentation and coming to this and believing, firmly, that as long as you have paragraphs in Heading-x styles you can create a Microsoft Word document Index just like that! (snaps fingers)

I have had in my time many clients who think that Table of Contents and Index are one and the same thing; that is excusable (and often enough the reason for them calling me in), but in a technical article about Microsoft Word documents? Never!
Worse, such an article adds weight to the mis-interpretation of the two terms

Cheers, Chris

[DaveA]

I agree with all of the above comments.
Dealing with people publishing their own books on Family Research programs, have asked why both.
In this case the TOC is a listing of the different charts and reports, at the beginning and the Index is a listing of the people, every time their name is mentioned, at the end of the book.

[ChrisGreaves]

If I had any sense at all, I would have attached to my initial post a sample document to illustrate the terminology. Clearly this was as an example of me being NOT right the other half of the time.

I have attached two small MSWord documents to this post.

(1) "IndexVersusTableOfContents.doc" is a plain Word document of text taken from earlier posts in this thread.
    I used the Title style for the title (page) of the document.
    I used the Contents style to identify a Table of Contents
    I used Heading 1 style to indicate chapter headings, where each posting in the thread is a chapter
    I used Heading 1 style to indicate the heading for the Index.

(2) The Index was constructed from the simple concordance table attached as "ConcordanceFile.doc"

The concordance table consists of strings that are
    (i) Between four and twenty-four characters in length
    (ii) Start with a capital alphabetic (that is, appear to be proper nouns)
    (iii) Are not common words, such as place names, names of months, connectives and the like
    (iv) Not containing decimal digits (hence part numbers)

A MSWord document can have up to twenty- seven different indexes, and as many tables of contents as one sees fit, but traditionally the main table of contents appears close to the front of the document and the index appears close to the end.

Cheers, Chris

[Jay Freedman]

As a sometime professional index maker for publishers of college-level textbooks, I would emphasize that building an index from a concordance is indispensable for some kinds of books but ghastly wrong for others.

As Dave mentioned, a genealogy book should index every occurrence of each name. The "names" index in a history book has the same purpose. These are appropriate uses for a concordance.

If a chemistry textbook indexed every occurrence of the word "hydrogen", that single entry would run half a page long and be completely useless to a student. This index requires a human indexer to read and understand the text, and to pick out the locations where a reader will find certain kinds of information. In some cases, a main entry will have dozens of subentries. Some topics will require entries for terms that don't appear anywhere in the text, but that a reader may be thinking about in different terms than the author used. In a Word document, an index like this can be constructed with XE fields. Some of them can be inserted with the Mark Entry dialog, but others should be created by hand. The Mark All button in the dialog should be used sparingly.