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TRANSCRIPT

Hi, I'm Chris Grover, the author of Word 2007: The Missing Manual.

This screen cast introduces you to Word's outline view. In the interest of full disclosure I have to say I'm a long time fan of outlines. I use them all the time when I'm brainstorming and when I'm working with long documents.

This screen cast starts off showing you how to jump back and forth between outline view and the page layout view. You'll get a quick tour of some of the basic outline commands on the ribbon, you'll learn how to expand, collapse, the outline items in your document and we'll wrap it up by demonstrating how you promote and demote outline items.

The document shown here is the entire test for Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities. In print layout view all we can see is part of the first page. Outline view gives us an entirely new perspective on the subject.

Now there's no mystery about switching to outline view. You go to the View tab and then you click on the Outline button and there you are. You see the novel in outline form. You can go back to layout view with a similar click of a button. Go to the View tab and click on Print Layout.

Now if you're a keyboard speedster you may want to use the keyboard shortcuts. Well the bad news is that the shortcuts aren't very pneumonic so press the Alt key and then you press W for view and then you press U for outline. Now the good news is that you have the little keyboard shortcut badges that point the way but you already knew that, didn't you?

As you probably noticed, when you're in Outline view Word gives you a new tab on the left side of the ribbon. If you're new to working with Word outlines it may seem overly complicated but be patient, it's really easy to use.

The outline tool group is divided into two parts. The tools on the left side are used to assign outline levels to your paragraphs. The tools on the right side are used to show and hide parts of the outline.

Let's start with the showing and hiding. When you're working with a long document like this novel, sometimes you want the view from 30,000 feet. At other times you want to be right there on the ground. Well, you use the Show level drop down menu to set your altitude.

Choose level one and all you see is the book title. At level two you see that Mr. Dickens divided his novel into three books. Level three displays all the chapter titles. And if you show all levels you get down to the paragraph level where you can see the paragraphs for the entire book.

Sometimes you want to zero in on a particular item. For example, you don't need to see all the chapters in the first book if what you're interested in is examining a particular paragraph in book two. The plus and minus buttons are great for that job.

Here's how it works. First you click to put your insertion point in the item that you want to expand and then you click the plus button and it expands it. Now if you want to collapse an item you do it the same way. Make sure you're in the paragraph and then hit the minus button.

For a quick way to expand or collapse everything under a particular outline item you double click the button that's actually on the page. Double click opens it up, another double click closes it.

When you're writing and creating an outline you want to be able to push the outline items around on the page, maybe a topic needs to be demoted to a lower level in the outline. Well, that's easy enough to do and in true Microsoftian fashion there are a couple of ways that you can do it.

When you're brainstorming and outlining your hands aren't always glued to the keyboard so the click and drag method works just fine. What you do is you click the button next to an item and then you just drag it to a new location. Here we're moving Chapter Two, The Mail, from level three down to level four and you can see that it's at level four by the marking up there. It can go the other way.

Now if you wanted to move Chapter Two so that it goes in front of Chapter One, the same thing, you could just drag it to that level and you've changed its position and the order that it appears in the manuscript.

If you'd rather use buttons to do your promotions and demotions the tools that you need, they're up there in the upper left corner. So if, in this case if we want to move The Mail chapter down to level four we just go up and click on the drop down menu.

As always if you're in doubt about what a button does just pause with your mouse over the button and you'll get a tool tip that tells you exactly what it does.

Well, that's your whirlwind tour of Word 2007's outlines. There's a whole chapter on the subject in Word 2007: The Missing Manual. Thanks for checking out this screen cast and feel to take a look at the other screen casts on the Office 2007 books.