From the course: Word 2016: Creating Long Documents

Outline your document - Microsoft Word Tutorial

From the course: Word 2016: Creating Long Documents

Start my 1-month free trial

Outline your document

“

- [Instructor] When you're creating a short document like a letter or a memo, it's easy to simply sit down and pound it out in Microsoft Word. But when you're creating a longer document, the structure or organization of the document becomes important because it does have some length. Words outlining feature was created for the design of long documents. And even if you believed you already know how you want to organize your document, I'd like to encourage you to give outline view a try because it's an incredibly powerful tool. It does more than simply give you a place to create an outline. It automatically applies the appropriate styles to the headings that you create as you're creating your structure. To get to outline view, simply choose view and outlining. To close it, you simply click the close button. And this is our outline view. In the left-hand side, we have a navigation pane of sorts that shows us that we are at the top level at heading one and anything I enter here then will become a heading. The document that I'll be using to demonstrate Word's long document features is an employee handbook created by an HR department. And if they were creating that from scratch, then they could begin by entering their first level one heading. And then the next level one heading. For example, employment policies. And I think we'll need to include some standards of conduct. And some wage and salary policies. Now perhaps I know a little bit more about some parts of my outline. I already know, for example, in my introduction, that I want to include two other items. So I'm simply going to go to the end of introduction, press enter, and then I can get the tab key if I wish to fly into a heading two. Or I can use the plus and minus buttons to promote and demote my headings. But just as in my Microsoft PowerPoint for example, tab to demote a heading, and hold shift and hit tab to promote it. Both work here as well. We're going to note information about changes in policies. And provide information about employment applications. Looks good. Now under employment policies, again, simply press enter, and then tab to go to a lower level. We have a policy on non-discrimination. And we also have a policy on confidentiality that we'll want to mention here. And I've been asked to include information about the mandatory new employment orientation because that is where we provide other information for employees that's an important part of our risk management. Now, automatically as I have been adding text. It's been formatted as headings. Heading one's, heading two's. The heading levels that I have available to me all the way down to heading nine. And I also have the ability then to add, for example, body text. I can do that as well. If I close my outline view for a moment, this is what my document looks like. It is as if I had created it here, in normal view in Word, but had applied heading one's and heading two's. And I didn't have to do any of that. All I needed to do was create it in outline view and that work was done automatically for me. If I don't want to see this text in a formatted view, I don't need to. If I simply want to show, for example, my top level headings in a longer document, I can hide the other levels. If I want to see everybody, I simply choose all levels. As you can see, if you are outlining a major piece of work, this is a great way to do it because we get a structure and we get formatting. Additionally, I can simply add other items as I need to. When I had one of my colleagues review this, they said, you know, the employment policies have a lot of information that refer to different employee statuses. You probably want to include those earlier. So here I go. I'm going to add definitions of employee statuses. And to remind myself what this is about, I'm going to enter exempt and non-exempt. If I wished, for example, to promote these, to move them to level one's, I can simply select them all, hold shift and hit tab, so I don't need to promote or demote items one at a time, I can select them all at once. And if I want to add any body text here, I can. Because remember, one of my choices is to format something as body text. So if I wanted to drop a little body text in here, for example, our definition of exempt, I can do that. I don't need to wait to move out of this view to be able to add body text to my document. When I'm done working in outline view right now, I drop back out of outline view and I'm back in my document. I never really left it. I was just looking at it in a different way. In any time that I want to rearrange large sections of the document or simply get the balcony view, the headings, or the top level headings, remember that I can simply go to view, outline, and drop right back into outline view, where I have the ability to take a more or less granular look at my document.

Contents