Almost forty indexers gathered virtually for the 2024 ASI/PNW meeting on Saturday, October 26. Program Chair Lisa Sorenson started the meeting by announcing the newly elected PNW Board: Elizabeth Bartmess, Chair; Lisa Sorenson, Program Chair; Lisa Sorenson and Caitlin Morgan, Co-Treasurers. She also thanked Laurel Rush and Maria Sosnowski. Laurel has stepped into the position of Membership Coordinator, a position held for years by Maria. She extended an invitation for more volunteers, especially for program planning, and invited everyone to stay for the Board Meeting after the regular meeting.
Connie Binder, speaking on “You Can Do It! Maximize Your Data-entry Efficiency,” was next up. Connie’s excellent presentation provided information and step-by-step examples in five main areas. She first focused on indexing software functions, encouraging us to revisit the keyboard shortcuts documentation of our indexing software manuals and gradually adding keyboard functions and PDF shortcuts to our processes.
She next demonstrated time-saving shortcuts with abbreviations and acronyms, a feature that is available on all indexing software. In her discussion of macros, she encouraged us to check out Elizabeth Bartmess’s online learning course on the topic, and then used Cindex to demonstrate the software’s existing macros and how to record new ones.
Importing lists was Connie’s next topic. She showed us how resources such as the table of contents, a previous index, or a word list can be imported into your new index and really save a lot of time with data entry. She concluded by discussing when labeling records is helpful and then offered some miscellaneous tips and answered questions. The presentation was full of useful tips that will be sure to save the attendees lots of time in their indexing processes. Everyone was thankful to Connie, who has a knack for explanations.