Re: MS Word Outline printing - help?

< Next Message | Back to archived message list | Previous Message >

Note: This message is from the outliners.com archive kindly provided by Dave Winer.

Outliners.com Message ID: 473

Posted by wa
2000-02-19 10:01:53

Dave,

MS Word 2000 may be your answer. In this incarnation, when you print from Outline View, Word actually prints your outline as it appears in the view. You can expand sections, collapse sections, and just what appears will be printed.

I like to format documents so that they look like an outlines in Print Layout view and when printed normally. To do this, you need to master the basics of Styles. I constantly use and tinker with Heading 1, Heading 2, Heading 3, ..., and Body Text, adjusting indenting, font face, and font size depending on how I want a document to appear. Using the hotkeys Ctrl-Alt-1, Ctrl-Alt-2, etc., I can quickly start a heading at any level when working in Print Layout or Normal view.

Each of the styles has a setting for what style will apply to the text immediately after the heading. By setting the following style to Body Text, you can get the indenting that you want. You can also tinker with spacing before and after to end up with attractive layout. Save different sets of Heading styles in templates for different kinds of documents.

Learn to adjust a style on-the-fly. Right-click on a paragraph that has a style you want to change. Make the changes using the “paragraph” options, such as increasing indent. Press Ctrl-Shift-S then press Enter. A window pops up offering you a choice to “Update the style to reflect recent changes”. That’s what you want. Press Enter. All other and future paragraphs with that same style will have the change you just made. The style change will be save only with your current document. You need to copy the styles from your document to a Word template if you want to be able to easily reuse them.

I owe Jim Eidelman, http://www.lawtech.com, for teaching me these valuable outlining techniques. I haven’t explained them completely, but this should be a start.

Wells

Back to archived message list