Bonus Web Content for Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Step by Step

Related Content:
Practice Working in Outline View

Restructuring Content in Outline View

Applies to: Word 2008 for Mac

Up to this point we’ve worked with Microsoft Word documents primarily in Print Layout view, which is the default view of all Word documents other than Publications and Notebooks. Another view that is convenient when you’re working with a document that includes headings is Outline view. In this view, you can control the level of detail you see—anything from only the first-level headings to the entire content of the document. You can easily collapse entire sections of text under the associated headings, and rearrange content by moving the collapsed sections around in the outline.

If you are creating a document that contains headings, you can format it with built-in heading styles that map to outline levels. Then it is easy to view and organize the document in Outline view. In this view, you can hide all the body text and display only the headings at and above a particular level. You can then rearrange sections of the document by moving their headings.

To view a document in Outline view, click Outline on the View menu, or click the Outline View button on the View toolbar.

Microsoft Word 2008 displays the document with a hierarchical structure, and the Outlining toolbar appears in the toolbar area at the top of the document window.

The Outlining toolbar

The Outlining toolbar includes buttons you can click to display only the headings at or above a specific level, to promote or demote headings, list items, or body text by changing outline levels, and to move headings and their text up or down in the document. The indentations and symbols used in Outline view to indicate the level of a heading or paragraph in the document’s structure do not appear in the document in other views or when you print it.

Tip A master document is an organizational structure for other documents, called subdocuments. By working in Master Document view, you can form one document from several other, smaller documents. This is convenient when you want to work with only small sections of a document at a time; for example, if multiple people are contributing sections to a document. In the master document, you can easily rearrange sections within subdocuments and subdocuments within the master document. You access Master Document view by clicking the Master Document View button located at the right end of the Outlining toolbar.