I have agreed to help a church set up a small library. They would like to
use a system of 4 - 3x5 index cards to catalog the books. How can I use Word
to do this with as little typing as possible. Each card would contain the
name of the book, the author and any other pertinent information.
Thank you.

I guess the church doesn't run a computer themselves? It'd be easier to keep
this information electronically than on paper.

In Word, you can either use Tools | Labels to get you a table that shows a
page of index cards, or set up a custom page size. How you set it up
depends on whether you will be feeding the printer one index card at a time,
or using a page with perforations that you can then rip apart. If one index
card at a time, then make sure your printer will accept that size paper.
You may want to create a template:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customizat...platePart1.htm

As little typing as possible: you can copy and paste from Amazon, which
seems to have every book on the web. If you had bibliographic management
software (which is what I use to catalog my books), they will often pull
this information from the web for you. Word won't really help there,
although if the data is repetitive enough, setting up AutoCorrect could
help:
http://word.mvps.org/faqs/customization/AutoCorrect.htm
http://word.mvps.org/FAQs/Customization/AutoText.htm

By the way--Word will let you type index cards, but it isn't a great app for
cataloging anything. A catalogue is essentially a database. If you have
Access, you might want to experiment with that, and I suspect it would let
you export the data into a form that you could print on an index card, or
use the Merge features in Word to pull it onto a sheet of Labels. If you
expect to continue to maintain this catalog as the church adds and subtracts
books, it might be easier to start out in a database program.


On 9/20/05 10:48 AM, "debicarter" wrote:

I have agreed to help a church set up a small library. They would like to
use a system of 4 - 3x5 index cards to catalog the books. How can I use Word
to do this with as little typing as possible. Each card would contain the
name of the book, the author and any other pertinent information.
Thank you.

--
Daiya Mitchell, MVP Mac/Word
Word FAQ: http://www.word.mvps.org/
MacWord Tips: http://www.word.mvps.org/MacWordNew/
What's an MVP? A volunteer! Read the FAQ: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/