MadCap Software Forums

I clicked the Index Entry Mode button, as I have done many times before, and for quite a number of minutes I have been watching a very busy progress bar on a dialog called Updating Global Index. The only thing it says is "Computing global index..."

Does anyone know what this is?

It's calculating all the tea in China. I usually press Cancel when it does that.

I can only assume that it is doing more or less what it claims: creating/updating an index of all your keywords. I'm guessing that's how it populates the Index Explorer. It often pops up for me when I first start the project, and sometimes after I move topics, or I use the Index tools. Honestly, I can't make any coherent sense out of *when* it decides to pop up, and when it doesn't.

You re correct Andrew, its updating the index explorer, Flare keeps all of its index entries in the topic's themselves, as opposed to a seperate file.

On my PC it normally just takes a few seconds to finish (even in large projects), but as reported above it sometimes gets stuck and stays there forever (well, several minutes until I lose patience and press Cancel).

Dave Lee wrote:On my PC it normally just takes a few seconds to finish (even in large projects), but as reported above it sometimes gets stuck and stays there forever (well, several minutes until I lose patience and press Cancel).

It's quite normal for the process to take 30 seconds or so for us in our large project. The others, it's negligible.

I see the same thing as Dave and Matt: most of the time, it's pretty quick, but sometimes it seems to go off into never-never land for a while. Haven't seen a reproducible pattern to it, though.