In defence of Word (5.1, anyway)

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

Outliners.com Message ID: 255

Posted by n.lowe
1999-08-27 04:07:46

There’s been some hard things said about Word’s outline mode lately, so I thought it was
time someone did the perverse thing and spoke up in its favour. I’d freely concede that, for
reasons explained below, versions later than 5.1 have crippled the things that made this a
good outliner to write in; that it only works well if you don’t use it the way it’s set up;
and that you have to approach the outlining process in a rather different way. But I feel
that this is actually one of its strengths, so long as you have more conventional outliners
to hand when you feel the need for them.

The key things about Word outlines are

(i) they work best when you’re not actually in outline view

(ii) you need to adapt to the fact that they’re style-based (overlaid on the document)
rather than structure-based (the document is built over the outline structure )

(iii) to use them effectively, you need to assign keystrokes to the following
commands:

#show/hide hidden text

#promote and demote headings

#redefine style by selection (only possible in versions up to 5.1)

The outline view is only useful when you’re moving large clusters of topics around, or
when you want to view selected levels of outline structure. For ordinary writing, the way
you work is this:

Stick in Normal view. Create your outline structure using promote, demote, and
command-shift-P (for Normal text style). Assign and revise text styles using
Redefine by Selection. This creates a hierarchical rule sheet on the fly; in 5.1 but not
in later versions, stylesheets can be easily copied from one document to another in a
simple open & save, making them as easy to work with as More rule sets. I like hidden
text in blue with different combinations of bold, italic, and underline for the different
levels.

Good things include:

#You can break the hierarchy. A level 1 headline can be followed by a level 3
headline without an intervening level 2 headline, and still retain the outline
relationship with it (treat it as a subhead, move it with the headline, etc.). This
can be useful in all kinds of ways, particularly when the level structure is more
important than the chain structure - that is, when the key feature of the outline is
the division of topics into level categories rather than their dependence on one
another in uninterrupted hierarchy. It’s also useful when you have a system of
titles and subtitle formats for the finished document not all of which will
necessarily appear at all levels in all sections.

#You can hide the entire outline structure and just show the Comments level (using
More terminology). The standard WP option of a hidden/invisible text format,
missing in More, means you can assign formats to headlines that are only visible
when you toggle hidden text to show.

#I like the toolbar buttons (in outline view) to display five different levels of
outline at a single mouse click: no need to go through the rigmarole of menus and
dialogue boxes.

#You can get a lot of text in a window. Word is, I think, the only WP that will let
you use 9pt Geneva with 10pt spacing without chopping off the descenders.
Anyone who’s grown up with a small-screen Mac will find this a hard habit to
shake once acquired. A to-do outline in Word can just sit in a corner of your
screen and take up very little space compared to anything else you might want to
write it in.

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