Expanded Petty Gods Writer's Index is done!

It took me about three hours this evening, but I finished the writer's index for Expanded Petty Gods. I definitely think the work was worth it.

One of the things I did when I rebuilt the spreadsheets at the inauguration of my leg of this project, was to split out the last names and first names for all writers and artists, with this absolute goal in mind... being able to alphabetize by last name. Once all the art is completed for the book, I'll do the same thing for the artists.

So tonight, I had to finish adding the page numbers (from the layout) to the Excel spreadsheets I've been using to manage each section of the project. Then I took just the columns for page number, writer's last name, and writer's first name from each of the master Excel files, and kept adding those to a single new Excel file. Then, in that composite Excel file, I ordered the columns: 1) last name, 2) first name, 3) page number. After that, I sorted them in that same order (ascending by Column A, then Column B, then Column C). Doing that also showed any inconsistencies in how a single person's name might appear. This allowed me to proof and edit the names (not just in the index, but double-checking them in the layout as well). From there it was just a lot of selecting boxes and "clearing contents" in Excel, followed by some "find/replace" in TextEdit, to create the final text file I imported into the layout. Ironically, the actual typesetting of the 2 pages took about 10 minutes. It was the three hours of prep-work that took all the time.