Office 2008 for Macintosh: The Missing Manual

Outline View

Your teachers were right: The more time you spend on the outline, the less work you’ll have to do when it comes time to write your actual paper, article, or book. Word’s automated Outline view frees you from the drudgery of keeping track of all the letters and numbers in an outline, while encouraging you to categorize and prioritize your ideas.

Note

Before Notebook Layout view, Outline view used to be the only way to organize your thoughts with levels. And it’s still a darn good way to do so. Although you can’t use audio notes in Outline view, it does give you access to more of Word’s other features. For example, you can’t insert hyperlinks in Notebook Layout view, but you can in the Outline. Neither can you apply Styles to the Notebook (that’s one of the reasons it sloshes around your intricately formatted documents), but you can in Outline view.

Building an Outline

To outline your document from the beginning, open a blank document and choose View → Outline, or click the second tiny icon at the lower-left corner of your document window. (You can also apply Outline view to an existing document, which is described later in this section.)

Whenever you switch to Outline view, the Outline toolbar appears (see Figure 6-8). When you first start typing, your words are formatted as Heading 1—the highest level in the outline hierarchy. (Outline headings correspond to Word’s built-in heading styles.)

Now you’re ready to build your outline. Press Return after each heading. Along the ...