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Use Outline View in Microsoft Word 2010

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Video: Use Outline View in Microsoft Word 2010

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Hello and welcome to VisiHow. Today I'm going to show you how to use the Outline View in Microsoft Word 2010.

Use Outline View Word 2010.mp4~canvas14 849172.jpg

Steps

1
The first thing you need to do is switch to the outline view
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I'm currently in it so I'm going to switch out using Hotkey Alt Ctrl N. This will return me to the normal view. So if you want to switch quickly to the outline view you would use Alt Ctrl O.

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2
Now we are in the Outline View
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Why do we use the Outline View? We use the Outline View because it allows us to organize information into compact areas making it easier to structure info and ideas. It is kind of like organizing your thoughts. As you can see here I have two titles, James and Tom. This is a way of compiling information. I can put a heading and a sub-heading.

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3
So under Tom, there is some writing and if I want to write some more I'll press enter to put another sub-heading to write about James' or Toms opinions, now there's another sub-heading
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Now you can see that you are able to organize this information in quite a simple way.
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4
Now I'm going to show you some Hotkey Commands that will make it easier for you to navigate around this view
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One thing we can do is we can create a new heading. To do that we promote and demote this dot here, the paragraph.

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5
To promote a paragraph, we use Alt Shift Left Arrow
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Now you can see the circle is bigger, implying that it is more important than the smaller circle. So the big circle is the topic, and the smaller circle is the sub-topic. Now I can create a topic. I'm going to use Roger. If I click enter, you can see it has made another topic.
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6
Since I want to make a sub-topic for Rogers ideas, I'm going to denote that using Ctrl Shift N
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If you want to promote the paragraph you use Alt Shift Left. Now we can write about Roger. "Roger thinks many things on a regular basis. Some innovative, some banal." We can also create more sub-topics about Roger. Again, if you want to create a new topic, you can promote it using Alt Shift Left arrow. Now we can talk about Sally, and then we need to denote this again using Ctrl Shift N. As you can see this is a way of compiling information and making it easier than having a lot of text everywhere.

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7
Another thing you can do to make it even easier, is to shrink the text to compact it
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You can compact everything underneath the heading. To do this, we can press Alt Shift Minus (-). The cursor needs to be on the name for us to do this.
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8
If we want to expand it, make sure the cursor is over the name, and we can press Alt Shift Plus ( )
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So I can collapse everything by pressing Alt Shift Minus (-), then Tom, Roger and Sally. Now you can see, you can have all that information, thousands of words, and it can look just like this so you don't have to scroll through vast amounts of data

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9
This way, when you want something, you can just go to the name you want to expand and press Alt Shift Plus ( )
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We can do this with James, Tom, Roger and Sally.
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10
You can also move selected paragraphs up and down
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If we double click on the paragraph to highlight it we can move it up or down with Alt Shift Up Arrow or Down Arrow.. If you want to highlight a paragraph using Hotkeys, make sure the cursor is in the right place and press shift and use the arrow keys to select the text. So I've highlighted this piece of text, and now if we want to move this paragraph up and down within the topic of Roger, we can use Alt Shift Up and Down. We can move this where ever we require if it has become more important or we need to restructure our ideas or information.
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11
Another thing we can do, if we need to make Headings, is open the Styles Panel using Ctrl Shift S
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This will bring up the different styles if you want to make a different heading. For example Heading 1 could be Names, and Heading 2 could be Ideas. This is a way to differentiate between one heading and another heading.
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12
We need to promote Ideas to make it a topic, not just a sub-topic, using Alt Shift Right
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Underneath it we want to denote it using Ctrl Shift N. No ideas right now. Press enter.
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13
We want to promote this using Alt Shift Left
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We can promote this to Debates. Underneath it we're going to denote using Ctrl Shift N. We can put Vigorous.
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14
If we wanted to see what was under Heading 1 and what was under Heading 2, we could press Alt Shift 1
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It appears I've made a mistake, and they're all under Heading 1.
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15
This is a good example of what to do
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Using this system you can still see that everything is nicely tucked away. Everything is organized and when you want to open it again to examine it, make sure the cursor is next to the name, and to expand the text under the heading press Alt Shift Plus ( ).
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16
So as you can see, Outline View can be very useful for helping you to organize concepts and ideas
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Perhaps before you write a big essay or before you do a large project this can be used to collect and construct the body of those pieces of work. If you have any further questions, comments or suggestions please leave them in the comment box below. You have been watching VisiHow.
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