Pesky abberant index entry formatting in Word 2003.

I have been wrestling with an odd problem with indexing in Word 2003. I have many index entries in one document and normally when I update the field, i.e., the index itself at the end of the document, by right-clicking over some part of the index and choosing “update field,” I get a nice index regenerated as I expect.

Today I notice that one or two index entries were bolded when what I want is for all displayed entries to be unbolded. Examining the offending index fields in the body of the document, I saw initially that some of the fields had been inserted between text that was meant to be bold. Thus,

The Rhine River { XE “Germany:Rhine River” } is popular for river cruising . . . .

was resulting in an entry in the index itself that was bolded. Relocating the index field (the field with XE in it) so it was not inside bolded text sometimes seemed to fix the problem but not always. Also, highlighting the field and toggling ctrl-B to bold then unbold it wouldn’t work. Cutting and pasting the offending index entry somewhere else would invariably lead to odd results such as

{ XE “Germany:Rhine River” }.

Same result in the index (but with the whole entry being bolded not just “Rhine” in this example. Highlighting just the text in the index entry and bolding and then unbolding it also did not work in the index.

What did solve the problem was to highlight the field and surrounding text and then hitting ctrl-shift-N to change the style to “Normal.” Make sure you change the style of any paragraph marks before and after the paragraph with the troublesome entry. Use “reveal formatting” to see those marks, of course. An alternative is to place your cursor in text that is “normal” styled text, hit ctrl-shift-C to copy the formatting of the text at the point of the cursor, highlight the offending index entry (and surrounding paragraph text if need be) and hit ctrl-shift-V to copy the formatting to that highlighted text.

PS – If you highlight the period at the end of a paragraph, you may fail to change the style to normal. Just don’t highlight the period. Don’t axe me why.