Viewing outlines

By default Outline View shows the entire outline and all of its text including body text. But Outline View does offer other viewing options. You can also work with an outline in other views. Let's take a look. Right now we can see all outline levels. But if you only wanted to show only certain levels, you can choose an option from the Show pop-up menu, which is right here. Notice it says All Levels. I can choose three as an example and it only shows up to Level 3.

Notice these gray lines here. That's telling us there's stuff under here that's hidden. In this case it's some body text; in this case it's Level 4 headings. If I show up to Level 4, you'll see those headings come back. I can also go to Level 2 and only show the two levels of headings. Let's go back to All Levels. You can also collapse or expand just a single heading and its subheadings. You just want to double-click the plus button in front of it. So I am going to double-click this and I have collapsed that and if I double-click it again, it comes back.

And that doesn't just work on the first level heading. it also can work on lower level headings. So double-click on the little plus and it collapses it or brings it back. If your document has a lot of body text you might find it useful to hide all lines except the first line. To do that, you just turn on this check box. Then any time there was body text, only the first line of the body text will show in Outline View. If this Formatting bugs you, if you don't want to see blue text or you don't want the italics or whatever, you can click this button here and it gets rid of the formatting.

It's still formatted, the styles are still applied, Levels 1, and 2 and 3, the headings, body text, but you don't have to look at all that. I'm going to turn that back on. Now this is Outline View, which has all the tools that you need to work with your outline, but once your outline is finished, you might want to switch to Draft or Print Layout View to enter your body text and finish the document. So let's view how this looks like in Draft View. Notice that there is a page break here and you are probably wondering why is there a page break? There is only four lines on this page.

The reason for that is that Word automatically formats its heading levels to stay with the next line. So all of these are headings and they are all told to stay with the next line and of course in order to stay with the next line, it can have a page break between them. So Word puts the page break anywhere it can and in this case it puts it right after the first time it's allowed to have a page break, which is right after normal. You can get around that by changing the formatting and the headings just to show you how to do that. You would make sure that a heading is selected, pull-down the Format menu, come to Paragraph and over in Line and Page Breaks, you would want to turn off this option.

Now if you turn off that option and make that part of the styles for each of the headings you wouldn't have these weird page breaks. Now I talk about styles and changing paragraph settings in other chapters. So if you're interested in doing that, you can look at up in those videos. So this is what it looks like in Draft View. This is what it looks like in Page Layout View and again you still have that page break. We could scroll through and we could see the other pages of the document. You can work with your document in Print Layout View and you can also work with it in Draft View or you can work with it in Outline view.

It really doesn't matter. If you work in Draft or Print Layout View and then later on you decide that you want to rearrange your topics, the easiest way to do it is to go back to Outline view and just drag them around and I do this all the time. I also find it handy as I work with a long document like a book, to go a heading only view to get the big picture of the book's organization. So as we have seen here, Outline View has additional tools for viewing your outline in a variety of ways. But just because you created the document in Outline view, it doesn't mean you're stuck there.

When you're ready to write the text of your document, you can do it in the view you prefer, Draft or Print Layout View. Outline View is always available as a tool for reorganizing or reviewing your document structure.