Strategy for creating a dictionary

I want to create and print a personal dictionary in booklet form. It should include words, their definitions, and preferably header guides (e.g., "egg" appears in the left-side header of a page that begins with "egg" and "egret" appears in the right-side header because it's the last term on the page).

I'm using Office Professional Plus 2013. Is there a good way to do this in Office? Enter data in Excel, print in Word? Enter in Access? Create booklet in Publisher? Just use tables in Word? I'm not sure what would be the easiest way to build a flexible and editable format. Any suggestions?

Alternatively, does anyone know of a better tool for creating dictionaries like this?

Answer
Answer

Sure you can use Excel to prepare your data.

You can use a mail merge to import to Word but it is faster to simply copy and paste it to bring it into Word. Once there you can apply styles to the columns (character style for column 1) and then convert table to text in order to get the paragraph type layout.

Andrew Lockton
Melbourne Australia

Was this reply helpful?

Sorry this didn't help.

Great! Thanks for your feedback.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback.

Answer
Answer

Personally, I would probably do this in Word although you could also do the data input and/or page layout in any of those programs you mentioned. Word and Publisher both give you more flexibility in how you might format the text (bold, italics etc) whereas Excel and Access enable more structure for your data entry.

How you layout the final document depends entirely on how you want it to appear. A table can be clean but takes up more space than allowing the definition to wrap back under the 'word'. It forces you to deal with questions like - Does the first column need to be wide enough to deal with the longest word or can we wrap text in that column too? Dictionaries traditionally avoid tables and put both into the same paragraph and show the word in bold (you would do the same using a character style). This keeps page counts to a minimum.

Word has the StyleRef field to allow your header to display the first and last occurrences of a style on the page ( eg. egg-egret).

Andrew Lockton
Melbourne Australia

1 person found this reply helpful

·

Was this reply helpful?

Sorry this didn't help.

Great! Thanks for your feedback.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback, it helps us improve the site.

How satisfied are you with this reply?

Thanks for your feedback.

 
 

Question Info


Last updated September 11, 2024 Views 2,161 Applies to: