How do I edit an index without changing the entries?

[Guest]

I need a scripture index for my book. Since the books of the Bible are not
in alphabetical order I must transcribe the book-names as follows: "aa" =
Genesis, "ab" = Exodus, etc. Furthermore, to get the chapter and verses to
appear correctly they must be padded with zeroes, so that Genesis 1:3 becomes
"aa 01.03" in the entry in the text. When the index is generated I must
change all the "aa" to "Genesis", "ab" to "Exodus", etc. and then eliminate
the superfluous zeroes. While Word allows such editing of the index, when it
goes to print the finished product it sweeps through the document and prints
the entries rather than what I've created through the editing. Any
suggestions? I tried hitting "Print Screen" to get a print of my finished
product but had no luck.

 

[Jay Freedman]

The index is a single field. When you print, by default Word is
configured to update all fields, so the index field regenerates its
original entries.

The easiest thing to try is to go to Tools > Options > Print and
uncheck "Update fields".

If that doesn't stop the updating, you can do this: After updating the
index field, but before starting to replace things, unlink the index
field by clicking anywhere within the index and pressing
Ctrl+Shift+F9. Then you can make any changes, and the index will never
regenerate. The downside is that the index will never regenerate -- if
you add more marked entries, they won't be added to the index.