Microsoft Word Outlines

Posted by Gary Carson
Jun 20, 2009 at 12:30 AM

Hello,

Guess I should expand on this cryptic question a little bit.

I was asking about Word’s outline feature because I’ve been thinking about starting to use it to brainstorm and develop articles and books. I’ve got Word 2003 right now and was wondering if the outline view had improved or changed in any significant way in Word 2007. If so, I guess it would be worthwhile to upgrade to 2007, but at the moment I can’t see any point in spending the money.

I’ve been looking for a good integrated outliner/word processor for a long time, but never thought about just using Word itself. For the past several years I’ve been using NoteMap, which works pretty well for my purposes. I’ll print the outlines out and use them for reference while I’m writing the piece. I’ve tried exporting NoteMap outlines directly into Word, but even though the export process works OK, the results are pretty messy and it takes a while to clean up all the various headings and bullets and so on in the Word document. Also, my outlines usually include a lot of research notes and stuff that I don’t want showing up in the document.

I’ve also tried using two-pane outliners like Whizfolders and OneNote to develop my stuff, but their interfaces are too cluttered for me to use a writing tool and I don’t really like using them as word processors. Personally, I like using a full-blown, full-screen word processor with no distractions. I’m currently using OneNote 2007 as an archive for all of the research notes and other information I want to keep long-term, but I never really use it as an outliner. For that, I like basic one-pane outliners like NoteMap (or the Word outliner).

Anyway, has anyone used Word’s outline view before? Any difference between the 2003 and 2007 outline views?

WHile I’m at it, I’ve got another question for any writers out there who use outliners in their daily work:

I like the idea of an integrated outliner/word processor where you can create an outline which also contains the body text of whatever you’re working on. Being able to work in an outline and then switch directly to “manuscript view” is like a holy grail for me, but so far I haven’t really found anything that works any better than Word (haven’t tried WordPerfect or the other word processors). THe problem is that I don’t want everything in the outline to appear in the document. Ideally, I’d like to be able to specify what parts of the outline go into the manuscript itself (for instance, chapter and scene headings with brief descriptions of what’s supposed to happen MINUS all the research notes and other stuff).

I guess what I’m getting at here is an integrated outliner/word processor where you can specify that only certain levels in the outline will be transferred to the word processor when you switch to normal or print view. That way, you could create a massive outline with all sorts of stuff, but when you switched to the word processor, you’d only get, say, the chapter headings and body text.

Does such a thing even exist? I think I know the answer, but I thought I’d ask anyway.

THanks in advance…