CONTENTS
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Editing for Psychoanalysis Eve Golden, M.D. |
Outlining with WORD
Outlining has unhappy vibes for a lot of people who had to make them in school and then were supposed to write papers from them. I've never met any people who actually write like that. Still, outlines are useful in a more freeform way. They're great for brainstorming, and an outline in a word processor will let you move large chunks of a manuscript around without losing your place. I tried Word's Outliner when I first switched to Word (version 6 it was then) and thought it much more trouble than it was worth. But with Word 97 the outline tool has become a smooth and elegant pleasure. Even if you aren't an outline maven, you might want to take a look. At the very least it's the perfect way to make your list of what to pack for the next IPA meeting in Samarkand or Cathay...
The aesthetics of outlines. First, a tedious but necessary digression. Nothing to do with the way the Outliner works, but unless we address it right away you'll never even try this perfect little tool. Because, bless Microsoft's peculiar little heart, the first thing you see when you start an outline (View-Outline) will have you groping desperately for Ctrl-Alt-Delete. Two different fonts, five different font sizes, bolds and italics all over the place and in no discernible order—it's enough send anyone with a normal central nervous system into convulsions. But don't worry. You can easily change the header styles so that they look good to you.
Look at the screen shot below, which shows the default outline settings in all their hideous splendor. They live in that little box with the down arrow on the far left, the one that says "Heading 1." That's the Style Selection drop-down box—it says "Heading 1" because the cursor is on a Heading 1-style line; that's why that line is highlighted. If you put the cursor on a different heading, that one will be selected and therefore show in the box. When you click on any of the headings listed there, its style will be applied to your text or outline.
If you don't like the way your heading looks and want to change it, select it in the drop-down Style Selection box and click on Format-Style. You'll get a dialog box with a picture of the heading in its current manifestation:
Click on "Modify," and another box opens:
Now you can click on Format and then Font, and define the way you want the heading to look just as you would in the font in a regular document. (I use straight Arial 12 for all my headings, and I use bold only to emphasize individual entries on a case-by-case basis. That's the easiest for me to read. But you can be more imaginative about it if you're so inclined. The only thing that matters is that you like how your choices look when you see them all together. Otherwise your outline will short-circuit your eyes and then your brain, and none of us can afford that.)
Once the heading style is defined to your satisfaction, make the change permanent by checking the "Add to template" box. Click OK to get out of that window and "Apply" to get out of the previous one, and you're all set. You can repeat this procedure to modify any other headings whose looks you don't like.
Note that next time you exit from Word, you'll be asked if you want to save the changes you made to Normal.dot. Tell it yes (you're saving the new heading settings). OK. Now we're ready to roll with outlining proper.
Using the Outliner. Look at the top screen shot. See the new toolbar full of arrows just below the three regular ones? That's the Outline bar. It comes up when you open Outline View (View-Outline). It is very intuitive and five minutes of fiddling with it will tell you everything you need to know to exploit Word's outlining potential.
Make an entry. It's the start of a new outline, so it follows the Heading 1 style and hangs out at the left-hand margin. Make another entry. It's another Heading 1. Maybe that's what you wanted, if you're the type who likes to sketch out the broad outline (sorry about that) first. But maybe you prefer to fill in the details as you go, and you wanted a subhead, indented a notch. Fine. Either click on the right-pointing arrow on the toolbar, or hit the Tab key.
See how it works? If you want an entry to move to the left instead of the right, use the left arrow, or Shift-Tab. You can go on like that nine levels deep, and at any point you can select the "Body Text" style when you're ready to enter the substance of your text at its proper place in the outline. (Click on the style selection drop-down box—the one at the far left of the formatting toolbar, next to the font box—and select "Normal." Or click on the double arrow on the Outline bar.)
The pluses and minuses at the beginning of each entry work as they do in Windows Explorer and I believe on Macs. A plus indicates an entry with subentries underneath; you can double-click on it to expand or contract them. A minus indicates an empty entry. A single click on the plus selects an entry and all its dependents. A click on the text of the entry selects just that entry, without its dependents.
Now comes the fun—moving the parts of your documents around. Select an entry. Now click on the up or down arrow on the toolbar. See how the entry moves up or down in the outline? If you select its subsections, they'll move with it. If you don't want pages of text getting in the way of your manipulations, you can use the numbers on the toolbar to collapse the outline back to the right degree of detail. You can also move selected sections in and out and up and down by dragging and dropping them.
That's it, folks. When you've got things the way you want them and the infrastructure is no longer necessary, go back to View and click on Normal or Page, whichever working mode you prefer. The text of your headings will remain, but the outline structure will vanish. If you were using the headings only for temporary organizational purposes and don't want any trace of them to remain, you can delete them however you want—individually or in a batch with Find and Replace. (I'll explain how to do this next time I have a chance.)
Have fun.
