Cockeyed Optimist

In Microsoft Word, you can view your document in a number of different ways.
At the top of the View menu, you will see these items (they may vary with the version of Word you have):

• Normal
• Online Layout
• Page Layout
• Outline
• Notebook Layout

There is also MasterDocument, but we’ll leave that for later.

So what are they all for, and how should they be used?

Normal

Despite its name, I hardly ever use this view myself. It just presents the contents of your file in a continuous stream. There is no indication of how wide the margins are. There are faint dotted lines running across the page to tell you where the page breaks are, but that’s it.

If you have headers, footers or footnotes, they can be visible on demand, but they will be shown in a separate part of the page, with no indication of how they will appear on the final document.

I suppose there may be circumstances when you would want to use this view, but I can’t imagine them — maybe someone of a different opinion might like to comment!

Online Layout

To me, this is even worse than Normal. The font size is shown very small, again there is no indication of margins. Page breaks are not shown at all, and if you ask it to show headers and footers it does so, but switches to a sort of Page Layout view to do so.

From the name, I have always assumed this is view is useful, somehow, for web pages; but, unfortunately if you ever try to edit web pages in Word you will find it doesn’t do a very good job of this.

Moving right along, we come to what I regard as the only sensible view, so far:

Page Layout

The Page Layout view is the closest thing to looking at your printed page of all the options on the View menu. (There is, as well, a Print Preview item on the File menu, which is even more accurate, but this does not allow editing, so you wouldn’t want to keep using it all the time.)

In Page Layout view, you can see margins, indents, headers footers, and footnotes; in fact everything you need to guide you as you write or edit. Page breaks show up properly, and you can have some pages in landscape format in the middle of a document otherwise formatted in portrait mode (you have to put them in a separate section, by inserting section breaks).

Another thing set of things you can make visible are spaces, tabs and paragraph marks; either by going into Preferences, or by hitting the appropriate button on the toolbar. Some people like to have these showing, others don’t - it’s up to you; I find them helpful as I edit.

Outline

This view is only of real value if you have been using a proper hierarchy of paragraph styles, as I was discussing in a previous lesson in this series, here.

But if you are using styles properly, the Outline view is extremely powerful. You can go to the View>Outline menu item, which will give you this toolbar:

If you click on ‘1‘, you will see all the first-level headings, and so on.

This is good to give you an overview of a long complex document, so you can check out your structure and logic. You can also see whether the headings are consistent, and edit them if they are not; for instance, you can decide to make the main headings ALL CAPS if you like.

And if you have a document, with, say 3 levels of heading and a body text style, you can do some very useful things.

Click on ‘1‘, ‘2‘ and ‘3‘, and you will see all the headings.

Then for each heading you select, you are actually selecting it and everything hidden under it.

So, as an example, we have looked at the overall structure, and decide that a second-level section needs to be moved. So make sure that the 3rd and lower levels are not showing, and you can then use the buttons that have the little pink up and down arrows on them to move that heading and all its subordinate headings and body text up or down until it’s where you want.

You can also decide to promote or demote headings, by using the toolbar buttons with the green left and right arrows. There are other buttons on this toolbar, so you can experiment and see what they do.

If you want, download this lesson.

Back to the Main Menu for these tutorials.

If you liked this, why not treat me to a coffee (or a bone for Kafka)? Thanks, mate!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS