Review of SKY Index Professional v6.0

by Heather Jones
April 5, 2002

SKY 6.0 is much more than a simple update of SKY 5.1. Kamm Schreiner did his homework and put in many features requested by knowledgeable indexers, and the result is a sleek program that is still easy to learn but is now flexible enough and powerful enough for the most demanding indexing projects.

Experienced users of SKY 5.1 will find that some things in SKY 6.0 are very different, and this may take some getting used to. Ignoring text or sorting it differently are now handled with formatting codes similar to those for italics. This can be disconcerting at first if you learned SKY using 5.1, but it works quite well and will probably be easier for new users to learn. Hidden and ignored text now show up in color, as does deleted text. Deleted text now hangs around until you remove it all with “remove deleted records,” which is nice if you want to undelete things later. You can also delete things completely the first time with Ctrl + X. Another change that SKY 5.1 users will note is that cross-references now always go in the page field.

Navigating in the index has become easier. My favorite change here is the addition of a “Goto locator” command, which takes you to a page number. This is wonderful when you are editing an index in page-ordered sort and you want to skip around in the pages. There is also a “Browse” function, which changes the preview pane as you type to reflect where it thinks you want to go. This feature is a lot like the regular “Goto” command, but you can stop typing when you see that you are where you want to be.

SKY 6.0 contains many changes that help enormously with data entry. Of course, SKY’s biggest time-saving feature has always been its AutoComplete function, which saves hours of typing time by anticipating your entries as you type. But SKY 6.0 has added some other features that offer significant time savings as well.

You can now speed up your data entry by doing some very neat tricks with the page numbers. You can increment and decrement page numbers, which is semi-useful by itself, but you can save yourself hundreds and hundreds of keystrokes per index by using these features in macros. For example, you can have as part of your standard working template a macro that takes page 120 and changes it to pages 120–121. You don’t realize how often you do this in an index until you have a macro do it for you. You can also take pages 120–121 and change them back into page 120 or into 121. These are the sorts of things that you do on every single page you index, so they really are huge time savers.

Other delightful new features are the “collect pages” and “paste pages” commands, which let you take all the pages from one entry and paste them into another entry, and the “convert cross-references” command, which takes an entry like “Raisins, see Grapes” and replaces “see Grapes” with all the page numbers from the main heading “Grapes.” I have come to rely on this feature for entries that are consistently double-posted; I put these entries in as main heads, but if they will also be subheads I just put a cross-reference as the subhead entry and then during editing I convert the cross-reference to get back the pages.

For indexers who use many special characters, it is a true joy to have two alternate fonts easily accessible with formatting codes. I index many math and science books, and being able to enter Greek letters without having to go to the character map each time is wonderful. Subscripts and superscripts also show up nicely on screen.

SKY 6.0 also contains some very nice improvements that help with editing. Groups now show up all by themselves in the preview pane (in SKY 5.1, the whole index showed up in the preview pane, while the data entry grid contained the grouped records), making reconciling page numbers much easier. However, as some of us who really wanted this feature found, it can be awkward when you can’t see the rest of the index and you want to remember how you phrased something. A nice way to get around this is to make a group and generate it as a little baby index, which you can print out or keep open as a second index. You can then go back to the main index and see what you are doing, while easily switching back to look at the group.

The “Filter” function has been completely changed. Instead of using SQL and its pattern matching capabilities to create filtered groups, you now use “Filter” for special groups such as the group of deleted records or the group of records entered by one indexer in a multiple-indexer project. Under the “Search” menu you can also create a group by page range or chapter/volume, a very useful feature for some projects.

Other features that help with editing are a “scan for errors” command that now lets you decide how many entries is too many, and a fully functioning spell checker. The addition of a spell checker is a great improvement over SKY 5.1 and is something SKY 5.1 users should consider when deciding whether to upgrade.

Formatting output for specific publisher styles has become much more powerful. This used to be one area where SKY lagged behind other software packages, but SKY 6.0 has addressed these issues and now sorting, placement of cross-references, page setup, etc., are extremely flexible. Indexers with clients who want special codes in front of or behind every subentry will find it very easy to format these things now, as there is a menu with places to add these in before the file goes off to the word processor. You could do this in SKY 5.1, but it usually meant an email to Kamm stating what you needed. You can now do all this sort of thing yourself. It is very easy to set up templates for different publishers; it was easy in SKY 5.1, but now SKY automatically creates a special folder called “Templates,” which is a great help for those of us whose computer files are as messy as our kitchen countertops.

This Review is provided with the permission of Heather Jones