Making an index in Apple iWork Pages

"Unfortunately, according to the Pages 09 User Guide and another site, the TOC collects only paragraph styles. This means you cant generate an entry for text in the middle of a paragraph, which is what most index entries refer to. You can theoretically mark your intended index entries–for example with white {curly brackets}, replace the brackets with paragraph marks in a style that goes into the TOC, create a TOC-that-looks-like-an-index, save it, and revert.

In practice, using find and replace to change a styled character into a styled paragraph break seems to turn both the preceding and the following text into the new TOC-recorded style. In ten minutes I couldn't make this replacement scheme work right, and then I realized: turning indexed words into paragraphs is going to be pushing later indexed words further down the page count, so except with a very short document or a very sparse index, you'll end up with TOC entries that give the wrong page.

What all of us word processor and spreadsheet users need is for Apple to design the interface, and Microsoft to engineer the functionality."