Microsoft Word indexing: easier in a previous version?

Factual Questions
1

I’ve never really put the index-generating ability of MS Word to use, but having taught various versions of it over the years, I’ve known it was a feature for a long time (possibly as far back as Word 6 for Windows).

I have need of it for the first real time, and when I looked at the way it works in the Office 365 version I have access to at work, it seemed wildly more complicated than I recall. Does anyone remember it working more or less automatically in a previous version?

Even if a more automatic indexing generates a lot of useless entries, I’d rather spend 1 hour cleaning up data than 12 hours essentially hand-indexing.

Thanks in advance!

2

Indexing is indexing, as far back as I can remember, in MS Word. You have to mark everything you want included in the index, with appropriate options, and then Word will compile the index from those marked entries.

It may be that in some past work environment, indexing was done by some other program, running as an add-in, or maybe a macro written for that purpose by someone there, but I can’t remember there being any kind of “automatic” indexing in Word.

3

Dang. Thanks for the help, though. (At least I had the sense to ask here before installing every old version of Word I have on virtual machines!)