outlining and numbers

[CShea]

I've read Shaun Kelly and am still stumped about outlining.

My goal is to create a more legible, printable outline than the
default Word choices (whose fonts seem too big, etc.) I'm less
interested in the use-your-outline-to-structure-your-article feature,
though I may come to that later. (Baby steps!) I'm talking about an
independent outline that I can use to organize notes and theses, and
to refer to in print and onscreen as I write. Like OmniOutliner.

When I go into the nine numbered layers and alter them the changes do
not seem to save. Or they save in odd ways. (I've had each new level
begin with an ascending Roman numeral--I,II,III--rather than I, A, i,
for example, though I selected the latter.) I've exited the customize
box and found that everything reverted to the original style.

For one thing, should I be "attaching" styles to levels--and, if so,
which style? I assumed that "body text" would be what I wanted, but
this literally adds the word "body text" to my outline.

Can I safely ignore the "previous level" prompt, since it produces
oddities like "(aI)".

And Word help says that to create a template--which I hope to do if I
ever succeed at this task--I go to File > Get Info. There is no such
dropdown box on my version of Word. (Mac 2008.)

 

[John McGhie]

I've read Shauna Kelly and am still stumped about outlining.

Yeah, this is a very complex subject, and Microsoft is not helping at all by
refusing to describe it correctly. Or by the fact that Word 2008 is
"half-way in between" the old method and the new method.

My goal is to create a more legible, printable outline than the
default Word choices (whose fonts seem too big, etc.) I'm less
interested in the use-your-outline-to-structure-your-article feature,
though I may come to that later. (Baby steps!)

Absolutely. Get the styles set up correctly and the rest of it will come
for free.

I'm talking about an
independent outline that I can use to organize notes and theses, and
to refer to in print and onscreen as I write. Like OmniOutliner.

You could. The Word outlining function is probably better when creating
long documents, because it gives you a view of your CURRENT document as an
outline, and enables you to move pieces around and add to them. All the
time, you are working on a view of the document the way it is right now:
which usually means you have to do less work.

When I go into the nine numbered layers and alter them the changes do
not seem to save.

OK, please do not feel stupid. I was having this discussion with a senior
technical writer yesterday, and he did not understand it either. This is a
massively complex and intricate mechanism.

You need to begin by defining a List Style. List Styles are not strictly
necessary in Word 2004 and earlier, but going forward, they are the only way
to get the numbering to "stick".

1) First, get rid of the "Toolbox" so you can see what you are doing
properly.

2) Use Format>Style and hit "New"

3) Change the Name of the style to "HeadingOutline" and the Type to "List"

4) Now ignore all the rubbish on the front page of that dialog, it will
only get you into trouble.  Go directly to Format and choose "Numbering"

5) Now we need to reset any of the existing lists in the document.  Choose
each sample in turn.  If the RESET button is enabled, click it for each
sample.  We need all the samples back to their defaults so we can see what
we're doing.

6) Now:  From the bottom row, choose the sample closest to what you want. 
Notice that the bottom row all show the names "Heading 1", "Heading 2" and
"Heading 3" in their sample?  Those are style names, and indicate that those
lists are already configured to use the built-in Heading 1 to 9 series of
styles.  Which means they have done more than half the work for you, and
they will work correctly.

If you were expert in this, you could customise one of the other samples,
but it's a lot of work, and if you make a small mistake you get perplexing
and difficult to correct errors.

7) In your case, you probably want Sample Number 5, second from the left at
the bottom.  Select it and choose "OK".  If you HAVE reset all the samples
in Step 5) you don¹t need to do any more, just OK your way out.

What we have done now is created a List Style named ³HeadingOutline² which
has associated all of the nine built-in Heading series of paragraph styles
in the current document with a numbering scheme.

The purpose of the List Style is to hold all of the numbering definitions
together and enable you to copy them from document to document.  It provides
an outer shell that contains about 1,200 different formatting properties and
enables you to manage them all as a single object.

We can go back later and adjust the numbering format, but if I have guessed
correctly, it will already be correct.  Our next task is to set the
paragraph and character formatting for pleasing visual appearance (or: to
make authoring easier).

The next step is to set the font and size for each of the Heading levels we
intend to use.  For normal writing, any more than four heading levels is a
smoke signal that shows the document design is wrong and you need to
re-design it.  For academic papers, you may need five levels.  But when you
are first creating your outline, you may well use all nine levels to give
you space to think.

8) For each of Heading 1 to 9, set the font, size, and colour that you want
to use.  Get rid of the ³Theme Headings² at this stage.

Themes are only partly implemented in Word 2008, which means they are even
more useless in Mac Office than they are in Word 2007, and in Word 2007
³Themes² should be regarded as ³damage² in a formal document, and removed. 
In this case, select the actual font you want to use for each heading level,
and set its size and colour.

At the outline stage of writing, I usually set each heading level to be a
different colour, so I can see at a glance what level it is, while moving
things around in the outline.  You can set them all back to black or
whatever colour you¹re going to print when you are ready to finalise the
document, but having them a clearly-distinguishable colour at this stage
will save you time and trouble.

Let¹s stop there for now.  That¹s all you have to do to get your numbering
working.

IMPORTANT:  Do NOT touch the Bullets and Numbering buttons from now.  If you
want different numbering on a paragraph, apply the paragraph style that has
the numbering you want.  If you intervene in the numbering using
Format>Bullets and Numbering, or the right-click, or the toolbar buttons,
you will break the numbering scheme in the document and do another round of
misery.

Apply the correct paragraph style to each heading and the numbering will now
come with it.

An easy way to do this is to apply ³Heading 1² to all of the headings in the
document, then flip into Outline View and use Promote and Demote to adjust
the heading levels as needed.  As you do that, the numbering will all simply
work, and so will the formatting.

If the numbering scheme is not the one you want to use, come back and I¹ll
tell you how to adjust it.  The secret is to get the closest sample to what
you want in the beginning: it saves a huge amount of work

Or they save in odd ways. (I've had each new level
begin with an ascending Roman numeral--I,II,III--rather than I, A, i,
for example, though I selected the latter.) I've exited the customize
box and found that everything reverted to the original style.

Yes. You see the issues that will arise if you don't create a List Style?
And the more you attempt to correct them, the worse the problems get.
Create a List Style and everything should drop into place.

For one thing, should I be "attaching" styles to levels--and, if so,
which style? I assumed that "body text" would be what I wanted, but
this literally adds the word "body text" to my outline.

Anything EXCEPT "Body Text". The Headings of a document are NOT part of the
"Body Text" element, they are part of the Headings collection.

If you did what I recommended and created a List Style, this will all be
correct. If you haven't, you can laboriously attach Paragraph Styles
Heading 1 through Heading 9 to Outline Levels 1 through 9, but if you do
that, you must carefully check that the Outline Level Number is correct on
each style, and that the Style for Following Paragraph and the "Restart
After" settings are correct for each level. It's a huge amount of work.

Can I safely ignore the "previous level" prompt, since it produces
oddities like "(aI)".

If you have set up a List Style exactly the way I told you, then yes, that
will be correctly set. Otherwise, "no", you can't ignore it, you must get
it correct. Which may mean starting again at Level 1 and putting each level
right all the way down the chain.

Which is why I told you to do it the other way ...

And Word help says that to create a template--which I hope to do if I
ever succeed at this task--I go to File > Get Info. There is no such
dropdown box on my version of Word. (Mac 2008.)

I HOPE they said File> Save As...

The help topic you are looking for is called "Create or modify a document
template". But the information in it is so trivial and simplistic that it
is of no use at all to people who are actually trying to do this task.

Hope this helps

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]

 

[CShea]

Great reply, and thanks for not being condescending--I know you get
this question incessantly.

I'll go back and play with it and see what happens. Many thanks.

 

[CShea]

Wow. Great success so far --- next step is to fiddle with the styles
at each level. But outlining is looking good. I'm in your debt.

 

[John McGhie]

This mechanism comes to us from Microsoft Word on the PC.

A couple of years ago, I was standing in a party at Microsoft Redmond
talking to the designer of the Bullets and Numbering mechanism.

I said to him "You know, this thing is now so complex that I suspect there
are only five people in the world who understand it, apart from the people
who work at Microsoft, and they're all standing within arms' length of you
right now."

He laughed and said "If you had been in the meeting I have just come from,
you would think that there are only five people in the world who understand
it, and NONE of them work for Microsoft!"

The problem is that he was forced to add "exceptions" to what began as a
simple and straight-forward object-oriented design. Marketing Department
stood over him and insisted on providing a way for people who do not know
how to format a document to continue to avoid learning.

The original design was simple, clean, and unbreakable. But Marketing
insisted that users who want to use "direct formatting" could continue to do
so. The only way to get that to work was to create a forest of "fake
styles" that Word invents on the fly to override the basic formatting.

Marketing also insisted that Lawyers (the source of all evil in America...)
could continue to have number formatting independent of their text
formatting. Because the clause numbering in a legal document is often
independent from the logical structure of the text. That's when the wheels
really fell off...

The fundamental "concept" of Word numbering is actually quite simple: There
are five pieces to the puzzle.

1) Everything in Word is in a "paragraph". The fundamental unit of a Word
document is the "paragraph" (and NOT the "page" or the "character"). Each
paragraph contains a string of text (zero or more characters) and a set of
pointers that enable Word to look up which formatting applies to the text.

2) All formatting in Word is assembled in objects, collections of
properties that describe the appearance and behaviour of the text. We users
know these objects as "styles". Word recognises several different types of
them.

A style is a table, stored at the far end (bottom) of the document. It's
below the text area and never displayed. It's like a spreadsheet: one row
for each style, one column for each property of that style. Some styles can
have multiple levels, where they do, they have sub-rows.

3) To create a bulleted or numbered list, the first thing we need is a
"List", an object that ties one or more paragraphs together into an object
known internally as a "List". A List can be either single-level (simple) or
nine-level (outline) type.

4) A List is a pointer that associates each paragraph with a "List
Template". The List Template is ever actually revealed in the user
interface, but if you go to the Bullets and Numbering dialog and open the
"Outline Numbered" tab, you see samples representing the seven most-recently
used list templates in the document. There can be several hundred others.

A list template is simply a table like a spreadsheet: one row for each list
template, and one column for each of the formatting properties. In an
Outline List, each row has nine sub rows, one for each level.

5) A paragraph also has two more pointers, one indicating the Paragraph
style, one indicating the Character style. A Paragraph style has a sub row
containing the Character properties of the formatting. The Character style
has no sub rows.

The fundamental concepts is: There is no formatting in the paragraph, all
formatting in Word is a style, whether we can see it or not. If a user
tries to use "direct formatting", modern versions of Word implement a
"polite fiction" ‹ they create styles behind the scenes (because those are
the only kind of formatting Word can do) and make it look as though direct
formatting has been applied. If the user does the correct thing and uses
styles for formatting, Word collects all their formatting into styles and
shows the user the names of those styles.

Now when we want to collect some paragraphs together into a list, the first
thing we need is a mechanism to collect the various style objects so they do
not get separated.

That's where the "List Style" comes in. It's a "basket" into which Word can
place a list of paragraphs, and the List Template, the List Levels, the
Paragraph Styles, and the Character styles to be used.

Word uses the List Style as a "collector" enabling it to manipulate all the
components as a single object. When working in Word, we would not normally
apply a list style to anything.

We would apply one of the paragraph styles contained within the list style,
and leave it to Word to add the target paragraph into the list and call in
all the formatting objects for it.

The above is a simplification: there are defaults, overrides and exceptions
all over the place. The one that most commonly trips us up is that the
bullet or numbering can have different character properties from the text in
the paragraph. I usually advise against doing that, because it adds another
order of magnitude of complexity to an already complex subject: but if you
MUST have bold red bullets on level 4, that's how you do it

Hope this helps

Great reply, and thanks for not being condescending--I know you get
this question incessantly.

I'll go back and play with it and see what happens. Many thanks.

--

The email below is my business email -- Please do not email me about forum
matters unless I ask you to; or unless you intend to pay!

John McGhie, Microsoft MVP (Word, Mac Word), Consultant Technical Writer,
McGhie Information Engineering Pty Ltd
Sydney, Australia. | Ph: +61 (0)4 1209 1410 | mailto:[email protected]