Remove Microsoft Word Index Entries

Microsoft WordI’ve written a few books over the last few years; I use Microsoft Word as it is easy to work in and easy to convert to PDF. Some of the books I have written have been self published. Doing it this ways means that I need to do all of the layout and formatting, such as creating the index.

On occasion, I have had a need to remove the index and re-add; this is most often when I am writing a new edition of a book. I’ve done a fair bit of searching for ways of doing this and have used a couple of different approaches.

One of the early approaches I came across was to use VBA to strip the index entries out, but more recently I found another, much simpler, way of doing it using find and replace.

Press Ctrl+H to open the Find and Replace dialog; in the Find what box, type ^d XE:

Find and replace

This will cause Word to find and select the entire index entry field field; leave the Replace with box empty and click Replace All:

All done. We made 546 replacements.

The confirmation dialog will show the number of index entries which have been removed.

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5 thoughts on “Remove Microsoft Word Index Entries

  1. Mike says:

    Thank you! You are a genius and saved me HOURS of work and frustration!

    1. Ian Grieve says:

      Now this is the type of feedback I like 🙂

    2. Richard says:

      SO very true! Thank you so much. You saved me 6,000 manual changes with this short cut! I am so grateful!

  2. Tom Butler says:

    Thank you so much for taking the time to share this trick. It saved me time as well!

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