You can put the cursor in the index and press Ctrl+Shift+F9 to unlink the Index
field and turn its result into plain text. That can be edited in any way you
like.

I'll suggest that you unlink the index, copy the text to the clipboard, and
paste it into a new blank document. Immediately go back to the original document
and Undo (Ctrl+Z) to restore the Index field, and close that document. Make at
least one backup copy of the unchanged plain-text index. Do all your editing and
macro manipulations in the plain-text version; if something goes wrong, you can
throw it away and make a new copy from the backup. And if anything goes wrong
with the backup, you still have the original Index field that you can unlink
again. Only at the very end should you replace the Index field in the original
document with the edited version. Oh, and did I mention making a backup or two?

--
Regards,
Jay Freedman
Microsoft Word MVP        FAQ: http://word.mvps.org
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