Office 2007: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8.  Planning with Outlines

If your teachers kept hammering you about how important outlining is and made you do elaborate outlines before you tackled writing assignments, forgive them. They were right. Nothing beats an outline for the planning stages of a document. When you’re facing writer’s block, you can start listing your main topics in a Word document, and then break your topics into smaller pieces with some subtopics underneath. Before your know it, you’re filling out your ideas with some essential bits of body text. You’ve broken through the block.

Word’s Outline view is a fabulous outlining tool. It lets you move large blocks of headings and text from one part of your document to another, and rank headings and their accompanied text higher or lower in relative importance. In Outline view, you can even show or hide different parts of your document, to focus your attention on what’s important at the moment. Best of all, Outline view is just another document view, so you don’t have to outline in a separate document.

Switching to Outline View

Outline view is another way of looking at your document, like Draft view or Print Layout view. In other words, in Outline view, you’re just looking at your document in outline form. When you switch into Outline view, your heading text (Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, and so on) simply appears as different outline levels (Figure 8-1). Similarly, you can start a document as an outline—even do all your writing in outline form—and then ...