iWork '09: The Missing Manual

Organizing Text with Outlines

As you start writing, it usually helps to have some vague notion of what you want to say. That’s where an outline comes in handy. Especially when embarking on a long piece of writing—a term paper, a book chapter, a project proposal—many of us attack the blank page by sketching out the topics we plan to address. The whole point of an outline, of course, is to eventually fill it in, to transform it from a simple laundry list of topic headings into a prose masterpiece. Pages’ outline view helps you make this transition, letting you create a list of topics and subtopics and then gradually fill in the details, paragraph by paragraph, with your final text.

The outline view helps you not only structure long documents but manage them, too, letting you drag and drop topics to rearrange whole sections of text, or “collapse” topics to temporarily hide their content so you can focus on other areas of your document.

Note

Outline view is available only in word-processing documents, not for page layout.

Getting Started: Outline Templates

The Template Chooser’s Outlines category offers six word-processing templates to help you get acquainted with outline view (Figure 5-29). Three of these templates—Harvard Outline, Basic Outline, and Research Outline—are formatted to give you the best results when your final document will itself be an outline. If that’s your goal, these templates will suit you fine, although in that case, you could just as well use a regular template and ...