The American Society for Indexing held its 2021 Virtual Conference, “Get Your Indexing Shot in the Arm,” on Friday, April 30, 2021 and Saturday, May 1, 2021. Three sessions were held virtually on Zoom each day.
In the first session on Friday, You Can Do It! Maximize Your Data-entry Efficiency!, presenter Connie Binder focused on ways for indexers to increase their speed in order to increase their income, as the more work you can do, the more money you can make. The session explored time-saving data entry tips, including importing lists of terms, as well as using abbreviations/acronyms, macros, indexing software functions, and keyboard shortcuts.
Abbreviations save an incredible amount of time, frustration, keystrokes, and scrolling. In Cindex, you can maintain multiple sets of abbreviations for use on different occasions. Abbreviations in Cindex are case-specific, so she recommends using only lowercase. They are unlimited in Macrex and SKY, where they are called acronyms.
For acronyms she uses the spelled-out form as the main-entry, with a cross-reference from the acronym. She creates an abbreviation with the lowercase version of the acronym that expands to the spelled-out form. That way, she can use the uppercase acronym in subentries.
Macros allow you to combine actions that would normally take multiple keystrokes into a single keystroke combination. She recommends Margaret Berson’s Megabit Macros (https://edit-mb-com/megabit/). Using this program, an indexer can copy and paste data from a PDF into the indexing software, stripping out unwanted formatting and line breaks. An indexer can copy the direct name of a person and paste it into the indexing software in inverted format. Among other possibilities, it may also be used to copy the title of a work and paste into the indexing software in italics with parentheses ready to type in the name of the creator.
Each indexing software has the capability to create macros. Any time you are repeating the same keystrokes, create a macro to do the tedious work for you. Macros can be set up for the following:
- Name inversion
- Scientific names
- Double-post creative works
- Copy a record and change the page number to bold for illustrations
- Make dates parenthetical
- Turn “city in state” into “city, state”
Cindex has up to 10 macros, while Macrex has up to 48 macros, and SKY has up to 26 macros.
In the next blog posting I will discuss the second Friday session of the ASI 2021 Virtual Conference. For more information about the services provided by the author of this blog, see the Stellar Searches LLC website, http://www.stellarsearches.com