Word Hacks

Chapter 5. Templates and Outlines

Introduction: Hacks #45-50

Outlines are an excellent way to organize and edit complex documents, and templates offer the best way to ensure standardized documents and to store customizations. The hacks in this chapter show a few ways to maximize your use of these two key Word features.

Create an Outline-Only Copy of a Document

This hack shows you how to quickly extract just the outline from a document.

While working on a long document, you may want to pass along a copy to someone else to review. But what if you just want a copy of the document’s outline? With the macro in this hack, you’ll be able to create a copy of a document that includes only the text at or above the specified outline level.

There are nine outline levels, corresponding to each of Word’s nine built-in heading styles. The lower the number, the higher the outline level: Level 1 is the highest, Level 9 the lowest. The rest of the text in a document has no outline level; Word calls it “body text.”

Tip

While in Outline view, you can select File→Print to print just the outline of a document. The Print Preview feature, however, will not correctly display the document.

The Code

Place this macro in the template of your choice [Hack #50] and either run it from the Tools→Macro→Macros dialog or put a button for it on a menu or toolbar [Hack #1] .

Running this macro brings up the dialog shown in Figure 5-1. The macro first asks the user what the lowest outline level to include should be (1 being ...