Number 224 - January 2002

Using Index to Catalog Songs
By Lynn L. Kauer, Saginaw, Michigan PCUG
One of my, outside activities is entertaining at nursing or assisted care homes. The entertainment program consists of a series of songs (average 25 per one-hour program) and the irritable cajoling of my assistant Ollie who contends that he is 362 years old. I began this adventure about four years ago. (Ollie joined me about two years ago when I found him during a search for ventriloquist puppets on the net.) The hardest task was to find usable background music to use in my portable karaoke tape player.     I began by purchasing some tapes produced by Sound Choice (they're now my last choice) that are available in almost any music store that sells karaoke music. I also found the availability of "oldie type" music to be very scarce. I also learned that the music written for background normally has little or no melody lines - the singer provides the melody for the song.     By chance at a church fund raising party I was invited to, it had an entertainer who also used background tapes for performing. From him I found an excellent source for music that has a limited, but adequate, selection of "old" songs--Music Minus One. Following a toll free call, receipt of a catalog and an expenditure of approximately $400 for twenty songs I was on my way.     During the past four years I have purchased over 400 songs that are used for the various performances. As I collected them, I scanned the words for the song and saved them as a single file in Word. In order to keep the songs organized, each song has a number that corresponds to the page in the file it is saved on. To list the songs) with the appropriate pages, an index was created using the Insert Index command.     Because I wanted consistency for the song words on each page I adopted the use of styles. The song title is defined as a header that was customized from the default. Other styles are Author, Chorus, Key etc. The Header Style is used to create the index, which becomes a field.     Because page numbers catalog each song, the index for the collection was placed at the end of the file. Otherwise, as the index becomes larger the page	number would change. Currently, there are over 350 pages each containing a single song. As I would assemble new programs I printed the pages (seven) containing the index and used it to find the printed pages that are stored in a binder.     As previously stated; when I purchased new songs I would scan or type the words and save them as individual pages as a part of a single file. Obviously , there was no way to alphabetize the list of songs because they weren't saved or written in that order. The page number catalogs each song with the corresponding number of the tape.     This became a bit frustrating when I would look for the song title. Because the index is in reality a "field" there is no way to sort it alphabetical1y. However, I found a trick that allowed me to do it using my scanner with the use of Text-Bridge Pro software. (I think any scanning software will work if it is installed as a functioning part of the word processing software.)     Using Word I scanned each page of the printed index into one file with the spreadsheet option selected for this task. The result is that it scans into Word as a table. After all the pages are captured, the entire table is selected and sorted by the first column containing the song title. The page number (song number) is contained in the second corresponding column.     The result is an alphabetical listing of song titles with the accompanying numeric page number. Now it's a simple task to look for the song title alphabetically and find the corresponding page (catalog) number beside it.     If desired, the width of the table columns can be adjusted to a narrow width to fit on less than one half of the width of the page. Once this is completed select all and format the page into two columns. As songs are added to the collection it is now a simple matter to add the song title and page number to the table. When completed the entire table is selected and again sorted.     Lynn is the SIG leader for the Word/Publisher SIG. He currently performs ten times a month at various nursing homes in the tri-cities area singing songs from the 1910's through the 60's coupled with his ventriloquism adventure with Ollie.
Number 224 - January 2002