Needing to create one, seperate MS Word index that references hundreds of separate Word documents by date

Not only sage advice (and I am directing this to you and one other person who responded today with a similar cautionary message) but absolutely one I have add in mind since the beginning of this project. The entirety of the journal has two digital back-ups—neither of which is attached to my computer (unless I am adding new entries to them) and one of which is safely locked away unless I need it.

I have no desire to see the work of three decades become permanently lost, corrupted, or instantly morphed into free-floating electrons.

Okay…probably a bad understanding of physics here, but you get the idea…

Wishing you as reasonably a happy holiday as 2020 will allow.

PSH

Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back. ― Piet Hein

Rohn007:

I am impressed--even better, excited--that one of the many strategies you provided may be just the thing! I haven't had time to examine the hypertext links, but I am looking forwarded to doing so.

As is so often the case for what seems on the surface an intractable problem, a solution can lay waiting to be discovered in breaking it down into something more manageable.

Since I am not interested in using hypertext links in the index ('must be a bit of the Luddite in me somewhere), your idea for compiling the journal's content one year at a time and working off that seems like a good path to take. I can then pull together the indices I've created into one master index...though I'm not quite sure how to do that in a way that's not too complicated to time-intensive.

And as you mentioned, this strategy also allows me the option to search (albeit in a compartmentalized manner) for keywords or phrases across broad swaths of what have written. Though reading each entry for the pleasure of doing so is something I will still do.

Again, thank you for your research into, and interest in, my topic. I am very grateful!

Stay safe and enjoy the holiday season--not in excess, of course (though consider erring on that side if confronted with the alternative).

Kind regards,

PSH

Greg;

Thank you so much for responding so quickly! I hope this answers your question--and forgive my long, drawn out reply.

As I reread through a thousand entries--a number I am selecting just for the purposes of explanation--and see a word or phrase that I want to call to the readers' attention for subjective reasons, I'd like a way to index that word or phrase with the date on which the entry was written linked to it. This is critical due to the hard copy format in which the entirety of the journal exists. (Most, but not all of it exists digitally, as well. In one case, I have a whole year of hard copy entries for which I have lost the digital equivalents.)  Finally, and I hope this answers your question: A day, a week, or a few weeks may separate one journal entry from the next chronological one over it's entire span (which is ongoing). This may also be relevant to your question: Several, perhaps many dozens of entries will have no content I deem important to index. So...

1. The indexing of a specific word or phrase could have a See or a See also reference to dates that are one day apart, two weeks, or five years.

That said...

2. The next time that specific word or phrase appears, I may decide the contextin which it appears is not relevant...and choose not to index that date.

Think of the index as a paper and/or digital tool that stands apart from the journal (no hyperlinks), and simply indicates what date to go to see something important about "chocolate," "Cousin Fred," "Halloween," and so on...

Finally, all of the digitized (online) entries have a date in the file name.

Does this help ? Please let me know if you have any additional questions or need more clarity. I really want to find a solution (with the time it takes to reread each journal entry the least important component).

Kind regards,

PSH