5 Benefits of Using Outline View in Microsoft Word

It’s hard to believe that the first version of Microsoft Word for Windows was released way back in 1989! It quickly toppled rival WordPerfect as the market leader, and it’s been the dominant word processing application ever since. However, so many features have been added over the years, that it can be hard to keep up. In this article, Mark Finney, Co-Founder and Facilitator at Keystroke Learning, covers Outline View, one of the best features of Word that most users still don’t know about.

If you use Microsoft Word to create and edit long documents, chances are you spend a lot of time scrolling around, moving content and trying to keep sight of the big picture. Word has various tools to help users organise and structure their content. But the sad truth is that most users make extra work for themselves by not taking advantage of Outline View.

My feeling is that many people think along the lines of “I can type, therefore I can use a Word Processor”. Well, yeah, nah, maybe! You may be ok with the basics of typing, but Outlining can make your job much easier, and it just makes good sense.

In brief, here are some advantages of Outline View:

• • Streamlines document structure and organisation

• • Makes editing more efficient

• • Improves workflow and Navigation

• • Simplifies collaboration on documents

• • Improves focus

Fun Fact: Early versions of Word included copy protection mechanisms that tried to detect debuggers, and if one was found, it produced the message “The tree of evil bears bitter fruit. Only the Shadow knows. Now trashing program disk.” and then performed a zero seek on the floppy disk (but did not actually delete its contents). History of Microsoft Word – Wikipedia

Let’s get stuck in and look at some of the reasons to use this feature.

1. Streamline Document Structure and Organisation

The default view in Word is Print Layout View. This displays the paper size and margins, along with fonts and other info. Outline View, on the other hand, allows you to see the overall structure of your document at a glance. This makes it easier to rearrange sections, headings, and subheadings without losing track of the content. You can quickly move large blocks of text and ensure that your document flows logically. This is especially useful for large documents such as reports, policy and procedures, contracts, or in my case, training manuals. If you’ve ever tried to move 15 pages of text in a Word document, you’ll appreciate how much easier it is when you use an outline. I’ve seen people trying to do this with 300-page documents and it’s not a pretty sight!

You’ll find Outline View on the View ribbon. Once you switch views, you can see an overview of your entire document displayed as a hierarchical structure, with headings and subheadings. Word has 9 levels of headings if you need them, but many of us will only ever use 3 at most.

The view is hierarchical, so headings with subordinate content will have a plus symbol displayed beside them.

One important thing I want to emphasize is that for Outline View to work correctly, you need to use Word’s built in styles (word’s default settings include Heading 1 through to Heading 9) when structuring your document. Your main heading should be a Heading 1, followed by Heading 2 and so on. Your body text (paragraphs) should be using Normal style. When you apply heading styles, Word automatically creates your document Outline, even if you’re in the default Print Layout view. As soon as you switch to Outline View, you’ll see the document structure. 

A quick side note here, another advantage of using heading styles is that you can then quickly and easily create a table of contents. The table can also be formatted to have the same structure as the outline levels. 

By the way, if your document is messy, with lots of manual formatting and other junk, you should spend a little time cleaning it up before you try outlining. There’s no point trying to polish a … you know what! For some tips on how to do that, check out our article, Why your document sucks and what to do about it.

2. Why use Outline View – Making Editing More Efficient

Outline View enables you to quickly collapse and expand sections of your document, making it easier to focus on specific parts without being distracted by the rest of the content. This feature is particularly handy when you want to make significant changes to a long document.

Keep in mind that you can use Outline View to create new outlines, or to organise existing document content.

In the document below, I want to reorganise some content. Rather than clicking and dragging over several pages of text, I’ll just do the following:

Click the View tab

In the Views group, click the Outline button.

Now I can see the structure of the document, I can decide how many heading levels I want to see. I’ll do that by choosing from the Show Level drop down. In the example below, I’ve opted to show Level 1 and Level 2 headings only.

I’ve decided to move the Chief Financial Officer’s Report to the end. To do that, I can first collapse the content to only show Level 1 headings. Then I select the heading by clicking on the Plus symbol to the left. With the heading selected, all I need to do is click on the Move down button on the Outlining ribbon and that’s it! No mess, no fuss!

Now I’m done, I can switch back to Print Layout view to continue.

Because this method doesn’t need the clipboard, you can easily move 100 or more pages in a matter of seconds, rather than having to potentially cut and paste a huge amount of content.

3. Improve Workflow and Navigation

By providing a clear overview of your document, Outline View helps you stay organised and maintain a smooth workflow. You can quickly navigate through different sections, making it easier to manage complex documents with multiple levels of headings and subheadings.

Once you start using outlining is that you can take advantage of Word’s Navigation pane. This is another one of those fantastic features that most people aren’t using, usually because nobody told them it existed. That’s my job!

Back on the View ribbon, you’ll find the Navigation Pane checkbox. Tick that, and the Navigation pane appears on the left of your screen.

At the top of the pane, you can see tabs for headings, pages, and results. The headings tab is the one we’re interested in for now. With the headings tab selected, you’ll see the structure of the document as an outline. Clicking on any heading takes you straight to it.  In fact, I’m using it as I write this article!

The Pages tab displays your document pages as thumbnails, like a PDF, while the Results tab shows the results of searches once you type in your search term above.

Once you finish with the Navigation pane, close it using the X at the top right of the pane.

4. Simplify Collaboration with Outline View

Let’s assume you’re working on a lengthy draft document along with a couple of team members. By using Outline View, you can all be on the same page – sorry, Dad joke! Anyway, outlining your document will make it much easier for everyone to see the overall structure of the document. This, in turn, means they can quickly get to the content they need, and get on with editing, adding content, and moving stuff around as necessary.

It’s also handy if you want to get somebody new up to speed with the content, by using the outline as a summary. They can quickly familiarise themselves with the document, then get right to what they need.

5. Improve Focus 

Outline View allows you to concentrate on one section at a time by collapsing the rest of the document. This can help you stay focused on the task at hand and reduce the cognitive load of dealing with a large amount of text. I know if I have a big document in front of me, I can get a bit lost in the details. Switching to my outline makes it easy to stay on track, since I can collapse the content down to just the bit I’m working on right now and ignore the rest until I’m ready for it.

Conclusion

Using Outline View in Microsoft Word offers several advantages that can help to improve your document creation and editing process.

It simplifies document structuring and organisation, making it easier to rearrange sections of content and ensure a logical flow.

It improves the efficiency of editing by allowing you to easily collapse and expand sections, which helps you to stay focused on the content you’re working on.

Outline View helps collaboration by displaying a clear and simple overview of your document, enabling team members to quickly navigate and contribute to your drafts.

By using Outline View, you can improve your workflow, focus, and overall productivity when working with long or complex documents. I encourage you to take some time to get used to it and I think you’ll save yourself a lot of time and maybe improve your workflow. I hope your next step is to start using the tools outlined (sorry, I just couldn’t resist it) in this article.

P.S. You can also use Outline View in PowerPoint. Stay tuned for more in an upcoming article.