I have long been annoyed that Word puts XE’s inline with the text, with the result that displaying them vs. not displaying them results in drastic changes of the pages and line wraps. Also, if you create an index or TOC with Show enabled, the index and TOC will be wrong. Further, going from seeing a problem in the index itself to the guilty XE is not easy.
The Basic Idea
But I finally found a good way to dissociate them from the text, such that display/not display has no effect on page layout or wrapping. The secret is to insert a rectangular Shape on each page where one or more XE fields are to go. Put the XE’s inside the rectangle and, if you wish, size it to fit. The index will accurately show which page the Shape and its XE’s are on. The Shapes do not affect page layout or pagination. If the page is modified so that the Shape moves to the next page (etc.), the index will correctly indicate that. Shapes can be hidden or made visible, so they should be hidden before printing.
Limitations of this method:
1. Multi-page index entries do not work with this method, so they must be handled the ordinary way. Since there will be relatively few of them, they can usually be placed not to change the pagination. They can be put anywhere in the document, and if necessary, given a very small point size.
2. So far as I know there is no way to hide the Shapes for the whole document in one step. For a long document, hiding them all would be inconvenient. One way to handle this problem is to hide each Shape as it is created with its XE’s in place: normally no Shapes or XE's are to be displayed with this method. The only reason to display them is if examining the index itself shows a problem. Then just Go To that page, do Show All in the Selection Pane, and fix the problem.