Are you the type of person who likes to have your ideas all organized and laid out before you start creating your document? If so, you’ll probably find the outlining tools in Word very useful.

 

The outlining feature in Word lets you organize your document into levels. You can have up to nine different levels, plus body text (regular paragraphs) in a document. Each level corresponds with a heading style, making your document consistent and easy to follow. So, you would have major ideas at level 1 (in Heading 1 style), and sub-ideas below each major idea at level 2 (in Heading 2 style). Level 1 is the highest level; Body Text (regular text) is the lowest level.

 

 

The outlining view lets you easily see this hierarchy as each line is indented according to their level. (There are a few other visual cues that we’ll talk about in a moment.) You can switch to outline view at any time: in an existing document, to see the hierarchy of your current document, or in a brand new document to create an outline.

 

Note that outline numbering is very different from using outline view; the two should not be used together. Outline numbering identifies levels of text by adding numbers or bullets; it is implemented via the Format – Bullets and Numbering command. We’re not going to cover this type of outline in this lesson.