How to make a glossary in microsoft word 2010

Hi, I have tried following this but is not working for me. Hi, Niamh. Have you tried removing the space from between the sets of brackets i. Any more help? Hi, Leekey. Sorry you're having problems. As with the other comments here, all we can really say is that the search term works for us using MS Word , in case that helps.

If your copy of MS Word is working correctly and you follow the steps set out e. What kind of abbreviations are you searching for? You may be able to modify the search using other wildcards if you're searching for something else. Worked perfectly. Thanks for the extra tip, Steve! We've added that option to the post. Stephan Platt. It seems to only pick up two letter abbreviations, so it splits a four letter abbreviation into two, any fix for this? When does that happen in the process, Petter?

Are you possibly missing the comma after the "2" in the curly brackets? The comma indicates "at least" in that context e. Amirul Anwar Mohd Solong. It detect only the DAR. Hi, Amirul. Unfortunately, the search suggestion here will miss acronyms that contain lowercase letters, but they are typically quite rare, so it should be easy enough to add them to your list manually unless you're using a lot of them in your writing and you should always manually review your list of abbreviations when generating it like this to make sure none have been missed.

Sumit Bhowmick. Jason Anderson. Highlight the term, go to the References tab, and, under the Table of Authorities section, click on Mark Citation. In the selected text section, add a colon after your glossary term and then type in your full definition.

Click mark. You will see a bracketed TA notation appear in the text. Inside the quotes, you will see your glossary entry. You can edit this text anytime, including formatting such as bolding your glossary terms.

Whatever is in quotes is what will appear in your finished glossary. Once you have marked all your glossary terms, click where you would like to place your glossary. In the dialog box, select your preferred format. Under category , select all. Make sure that the box next to keep original formatting is checked to preserve any formatting changes you made to your entries. Finally, under tab leader , select none. Hit OK , and your glossary will appear in your document albeit with page numbers—more on that in a moment.

To make changes to your glossary entries, locate the appropriate TA notation and update the text in quotes. Some prefer to mark as they go, but the codes complicate things. You might find in the end, that you prefer marking terms after you've completed the document. Because you're creating a glossary and not an index or Table of Contents, it doesn't matter which term you select if the term occurs multiple times.

After marking the three glossary terms, your document might resemble the one shown in Figure C. After marking all the glossary terms, you're ready to generate the actual glossary. To get started, position the cursor where you want the glossary to appear. In the resulting dialog, choose none from the Tab Leader dropdown. Click OK, and you can see the resulting glossary in Figure D.

It's immediately obvious that there are a few problems: The TA displays a title based on the category you choose when marking the term, and the table displays page numbers. The first, the Cases title, is easily solved. Simply select it and press Delete. Or, replace it with Glossary. However, every time you update the glossary, you need to delete or replace the title text.

To the best of my knowledge, there's no permanent solution. Changing the title and hiding the page numbers is awkward, but it gets the job done. Just remember to tweak both if you update the table. Did you notice that there's a typo in the definition for video? The word broadcasting is missing the b. Fortunately, this is easy to fix. Note: You can't type the braces by hand. You can, however type ctrl-F9 and type the text of the field.

But it's much easier to use the Mark Citation dialog box. You will use the same process to mark other acronyms and terms that you want to appear in the glossary. But for now, keep going to see what it's going to look like. Then you can come back and mark other acronyms and terms for the glossary.

Press F9 to update the field and Shift-F9 to toggle the field between displaying field codes and displaying field results. Note that you can't type the braces by hand.

You must do ctrl-F9 and type within the braces that Word gives you. You don't want page numbers in a glossary. If you want pages numbers, then what you need is an index, and you would be better off using Word's index functionality. Unfortunately, a Table of Authorities has no switch to turn off page numbers.

So the best we can do is to position them where they can't be seen. Update the TOA field by positioning the cursor in the field and pressing F9. The page numbers should now be off the page where they can't be seen. This is where the limitations of the TOA functionality appear. You can't line up the descriptions to look like a table.

But you can use several other tricks:. You may be tempted to change the name of one of the TOA categories to use as a heading. For example, you could change "Cases" to "Glossary". And your document could properly generate a "Glossary" heading. But it will only work on your machine.