The tedious part of creating those Indexes is the actual marking of your entries, since Word won’t provide an option for that in the Marking Panel.

A solution is to add to your entries a unique sequence of digits and / or letters for each of your Indexes. When your work finishes, with nothing left but to build the Indexes, just use the Finder to replace each unique sequence with the code needed for Word to determine the ID of your entries.

For instance, when you create an entry for Boston using the Marking Panel, instead of writing just Boston, you can write Boston1places (1 is the ID of your Index of places). Word will create this code: {XE “Boston1places”}

Doing the same for all your places, you have entries like, {XE “Boston1places”}, {XE “Los Angeles1places”}, {XE “New York1places”}, etc.

When you are ready to build your Indexes, Find and Replace those entries with the rest of the code that Word needs to identify your entries as belonging to a particular Index, in our example the Index “1”, or Index of Places.

Press Ctrl+Shift+Asterisk to reveal the field codes, then search for

1places

and replace all instances of it with

” \f “1

This replacement code may seem incomprehensible, but if you pay attention you can understand its form. Let me explain it, in case you are confused.

Here is a complete entry of a place, including a temporary mark that helps you relate this entry with a particular Index:

{XE “Boston1places”}

The entry does not include the f switch that attaches it to the Index of Places, but you know where it belongs because the very keyword contains the temporary mark: 1places, with “1” being the Index ID, and the word “places” functioning as a simple reminder for you.

If we add manually the f switch, which in our example is number “1”, our entry becomes, {XE “Boston1places” \f “1”}.