An outline is a draft version of your document that is useful for viewing the main ideas of your text and further developing them. You can collapse and expand the levels of your document to display a condensed version of your text and much more with Outlining in Word. Use the following articles to learn how to navigate and format your document as an outline.

Tips, Tricks, and Answers

The following articles are available for the 'Outlining' topic. Click the article''s title (shown in bold) to see the associated article.

   Changing a Heading to Body Text
When working on an outline of your document, you may want to demote a heading so that it is treated just like your body text. This is easy to do using the tools on the Outlining tab of the ribbon.

   Changing Body Text to a Heading
When working on a document in Outline view, you may need to change regular body text to a heading in the outline. It's easy to do using the outlining tools that Word provides.

   Changing Outline Heading Level
Working with a document's outline can be a great way to organize your writing. Word provides a variety of tools for working with outlines, including tools that allow you to adjust the heading levels of elements in your outline.

   Changing Outline Structure
When working with the outline of a document, you can easily move whole sections of your document. It is as easy as selecting a heading and clicking an up or down arrow.

   Condensing and Expanding Headings
When working in Outline view, you'll undoubtedly have the need to expand or condense information under your headings. It is easy to do using the tools that Word provides for outlines.

   Controlling How Body Text is Displayed
When working in Outline view, you can control how Word displays the body text under each heading. You can specify that only the first line of each paragraph be displayed, or that the entire paragraph be shown.

   Formatting All Headings At Once
If you need to apply a common formatting change to all the headings in your document, a quick way to do it is to use the Outline view of Word. This tip presents a simple technique that can save you loads of time.

   Formatting In Your Outline
Don't like the formatting that appears when looking at your document in Outline view? You can turn off the formatting and work with just the outline text by using this tip.

   Navigating Your Document Using Outline View
When you need to get around a long document, a really helpful method is to use the Outline view built into Word. This tip explains how this view can make your navigation tasks easier.

   Printing an Outline
Outlining is a great way to develop the content of your document. If you need to, you can even print the outline and only the outline, without all the content.

   Sharing Headings with Others
Headings form the outline of your document and hopefully give it an easy-to-follow organization. If you want to share those headings with others, there are a couple of approaches you can take.

   Understanding Outlining in Word
Remember when you needed to create outlines for your writing when you were in school? Word includes outlining capabilities that can make it easy for you to organize your thoughts and improve your writing.

   Using Outline Numbering in a Table
Can you put a numbered outline in a table? Yes, you can. But Word is rather prickly when it comes to using the keyboard to navigate that outline.