Below is a brief explanation of the fields in the Insert Index Entry dialog box and how to use them.

• Index – The type of index this entry is for. The default is Alphabetical Index, but you can use this field to create extra entries for a table of contents or user-defined indexes or lists of almost anything. For example, you might want an index containing only the scientific names of species mentioned in the text, and a separate index containing only the common names of species. See Creating and using other types of indexes.
• Entry – The word or phrase to be added to the selected index. This word or phrase does not need to be in the document itself; you can add synonyms and other terms that you want to appear in the index.
• 1st key – An index key is an index entry that has no associated page number and has several subentries that do have page numbers. Keys are useful ways of grouping related topics. (See Example of using an index key.)
• 2nd Key – You can have a three-level index, where some of the first-level keys have level-2 entries that are also keys (without page numbers). This degree of index complexity is not often necessary.
• Main entry – When the same term is indexed on several pages, often one of those pages has more important or detailed information on that topic, so it is the main entry. To make the page number for the main, or most important, entry stand out, select this checkbox and then define the character style for the page number of a main index entry to be bold, for example.
• Apply to all similar texts – Select this checkbox if you want Writer to automatically identify and mark any other word or phrase that matches the current selection. The Match case and Whole words only checkboxes become available if this checkbox is selected.