How do I create an index in Pages?

Hi EHROBB,

No easy way in my opinion. The Pages'09 User Guide gives no clue. It seems you will have to do it the old-fashioned way by searching for key words.

I found this on Page 121 of the Pages'09 User Guide. (You can download the Guide from the Help Menu in Pages. Well worth investing some time reading.)

Searching for All Occurrences of Words and Phrases

You can generate a list of all occurrences of a specific word or phrase (including placeholder text) in your document. If you select a search result in the list, the
page containing the matching text is displayed in the main viewing area, and the text is highlighted.

Pages searches for a match to the word or phrase in the main body text, headers and footers, tables, text boxes, shapes, footnotes and endnotes, and comments.

To conduct a search:

1. 1 Show and hide the search sidebar by clicking View in the toolbar and choosing Search.
2. 2 Type the word or phrase you want to search for in the search field. Results, with page references and some text that appears before or after the word or phrase, are listed as you type.

(Italics are mine)

Good Luck!

Ian

If Pages is not good with an Index (or a Table of Contents), is there a program that does it?

Adobe PageMaker used to do it, but Adobe no longer offers it. I tried Adobe InDesign, but it's not much help.

Pages can do a Table of contents but it can't do an index.

Still not possible in new version of Pages??? I have the latest by the time: 5.2

I have found that Microsoft Word does an Index and also Table of Contents.

I will use Word instead of Pages for my upcoming books.

Nisus Writer Pro is much better if you want to create one or multiple indexes. You can actually have as many different indexes as you like. There are various ways to do it, and there are very powerful macros available that can create full word lists in seconds. You select the words you need from the list(s), click a button and your index is ready. You can prevent common words (such as "and", "or", "the") to appear in the lists. Clicking on the corresponding page number in the index takes you directly to the paragraph where the word (or the phrase) is. You can also index a word "a" as "b", that is, you can index the word "dog" as "animal". Then "animal" will appear in the index. — Why use MS Word, when Nisus Writer Pro is so much more powerful writing tool?

Why pay for Nisus Writer Pro when you can get strong, documented, Indexing features for free in LibreOffice Writer?

A legitimate question, Viking. :-) I suggested Nisus because Flash2 had mentioned MS Word, and I think creating indexes with Nisus is much easier. — Now to LibreOffice.

It seems the page numbers in the Alphabetical Index are NOT hot links, i.e. if you double click on them, then nothing happens, whereas in Nisus Writer Pro you will be immediately taken directly to the location in the document where the indexed word is. Even if a word appears on many different pages, clicking on the corresponding page number will always take you to the right location. This is of course much better.

In LibreOffice the settings for Index and Table of Contents are in one and the same pane called "Insert Index/Table". This is confusing. Every time I open this pane in order to insert the final Index into the document, I am presented with Table of Contents settings, which I don't want to have anything to do with, because I'm creating an Index, not a Table of Contents. I have to first *change* the drop-down menu called "Type" from "Table of Contents" to "Alphabetical Index" every time I want to insert an Index. This isn't well thought out. In Nisus these features are clearly separated, which is much better.

It is about the tools that work for us, and not working for the tools. 😉

i recently converted over to Mac and was very excited about continuing to work on a book I had started in Microsoft Word. In learning to use Pages, however, I find to my horror that there is no index function! I hate the thought of the extra cost to buy a new Microsoft program when I really want to stick with Apple Apps. I'm really disappointed to see that people have been asking for an index function in Pages since 2013....wow!

Is there any plan for adding indexing in an upcoming update of iPages?

It is against the terms of this support community to speculate about Apple products and planning — which Apple does not share with this user-to-user support community anyway. Apple Leadership, and product teams do not read or participate in these support communities.

It was never an Apple design goal to produce a Word clone, and thus, most of Word's features have no counterpart in Pages. Just because you have a Mac does not require you to use Pages. The free LibreOffice Suite, in its Writer application, is a Word clone, and offers indexing. You may need the Writer documentation to jump start though. The documentation was written with LibreOffice Writer. There are other non-Apple, word-processing applications that can do indexing too.

If the end result of that book effort is to submit a Word document to a publisher that uses Word in Microsoft Office to proof it, then it might be sane now to stick with the real MS Word.

The index absence is more troublesome than said here. In the old Pages version, 4.0, index possibility existed. Ignoring that it doesn't exist in Pages 5.6, I have translated into that new version a document created with the old version. Then I have lost the links of the index. I have realized that after having made some modifications on the translated document and saved them. Unfortunately, I can't return to the old document and opening it with Pages 4.0 as it has been replaced by the new one. Fortunately, I could use a backup version of it.

Conclusion: I strongly regret that Apple developpers didn't kept a feature, as index, when they upgrade any application.

That is really detrimental for the users and has nothing to do with a Word comparison. Sorry

No installation of Pages '09 v4.0.1 thru v4.3 that I have installed provided any document indexing capability. Are you confusing the indexing terminology with Table of Contents generation?

You can create Bookmarks in Pages '09 and it is possible to create a Table of Contents using just the things you want to Index in Pages, export that and reimport it and with some editing make that an Index but that would lose the links and is only possible with whole paragraphs not words.

Peter