About viewing a document as an outline
Outline symbols and indentations in outline view show you how a document is organized and make it easy to quickly restructure a document. To make it easier to view and reorganize a document's structure, you can collapse the document to show just the headings you want.
Heading with subtext
Body text
A gray line under a heading represents collapsed subordinate text
Heading without subtext
You can reorder headings and body text by moving them up or down or promote or demote headings and text by using buttons on the Outlining toolbar. You can also drag the outline symbols to the left, right, up or down to reorganize a document.
While you can see any Microsoft Word document in outline view by clicking Outline on the View menu, what you see depends on how the document is formatted. Headings must be formatted with one of the built-in heading styles that come with Word, or paragraphs must be formatted with outline levels.
As you rearrange the headings and subheadings in outline view, Word automatically applies built-in heading styles to them.