There's been some hard things said about Word's outline mode lately, so I thought it was
time someone did the perverse thing and spoke up in its favour. I'd freely concede that, for
reasons explained below, versions later than 5.1 have crippled the things that made this a
good outliner to write in; that it only works well if you don't use it the way it's set up;
and that you have to approach the outlining process in a rather different way. But I feel
that this is actually one of its strengths, so long as you have more conventional outliners
to hand when you feel the need for them.

The key things about Word outlines are

(i) they work best when you're not actually in outline view

(ii) you need to adapt to the fact that they're style-based (overlaid on the document)
rather than structure-based (the document is built over the outline structure )

(iii) to use them effectively, you need to assign keystrokes to the following
commands:

#show/hide hidden text

#promote and demote headings

#redefine style by selection (only possible in versions up to 5.1)

The outline view is only useful when you're moving large clusters of topics around, or
when you want to view selected levels of outline structure. For ordinary writing, the way
you work is this:

Stick in Normal view. Create your outline structure using promote, demote, and
command-shift-P (for Normal text style). Assign and revise text styles using
Redefine by Selection. This creates a hierarchical rule sheet on the fly; in 5.1 but not
in later versions, stylesheets can be easily copied from one document to another in a
simple open & save, making them as easy to work with as More rule sets. I like hidden
text in blue with different combinations of bold, italic, and underline for the different
levels.

Good things include:

#You can break the hierarchy. A level 1 headline can be followed by a level 3
headline without an intervening level 2 headline, and still retain the outline
relationship with it (treat it as a subhead, move it with the headline, etc.). This
can be useful in all kinds of ways, particularly when the level structure is more
important than the chain structure - that is, when the key feature of the outline is
the division of topics into level categories rather than their dependence on one
another in uninterrupted hierarchy. It's also useful when you have a system of
titles and subtitle formats for the finished document not all of which will
necessarily appear at all levels in all sections.

#You can hide the entire outline structure and just show the Comments level (using
More terminology). The standard WP option of a hidden/invisible text format,
missing in More, means you can assign formats to headlines that are only visible
when you toggle hidden text to show.

#I like the toolbar buttons (in outline view) to display five different levels of
outline at a single mouse click: no need to go through the rigmarole of menus and
dialogue boxes.

#You can get a lot of text in a window. Word is, I think, the only WP that will let
you use 9pt Geneva with 10pt spacing without chopping off the descenders.
Anyone who's grown up with a small-screen Mac will find this a hard habit to
shake once acquired. A to-do outline in Word can just sit in a corner of your
screen and take up very little space compared to anything else you might want to
write it in.

Ditto. And I've been using Word for Windows on the PC, and finding the same thing. That, aside from the funkiness and inelegance, there's a lot of really neat things you can do with the Word outliner.

Templates are cool (and MORE-like). Making a special template for the outline view is especially cool. Especially once you've tried working in the really UGLY template that Microsoft gives you. There's a good outline template on my home page for your personal consumption (http://www.technography.com

And DID YOU KNOW that you can "send" your outline directly to PowerPoint (at least on the PC)? Now all they have to do is add a decent tree chart maker and we can at last have a pale echo of a Windows version of MORE.

This will sound strange, particularly since I learned technography from Bernie. I really tried using Word but have failed. Yes, I agree, the best way to use word's outliner is to define the keystrokes. But there's so much other work to be done...

Pray tell, how can this assertion make sense:
"they work best when you're not actually in outline view".
I want to outline in outliner mode...
I sort of understand the comment, because I often revert to outline view to navigate through a huge document. But that still does not make me use the outlining functions per se.

The levels of outlines can effectively be useful. But since you can have a grandchild without his/her father, this means you can be organising your thoughts ALL OVER the map. One, this reduces rigour in what you are doing (I've learned internally that structure is key. Even in cases where I would like my same 'leader characteristics' to be associated with a certain type of information, but what is generated is off by one level or so, I am forced to conform and find an organisation -> that rigour is, well, priceless, IMHO). Otherwise, you literally need a meta-level of thinking to keep each different level's meaning active. That's too much on my brain when I am working, let alone sharing my thoughts with someone else.

Frankly, most of these plusses are really negatives to me. It boggles my mind why the folks at MS haven't talked to Dave over all these years to get their functionalities just right. Make it workable in outline mode (structure, hot keys) and keep the family tree unmutable.