An outline is composed of topics and subtopics. The main topics are your main ideas, with the subtopics describing the details. You should start your Microsoft Word outline by adding the main topics. To do so, just type them out. Pressing Enter after typing a topic produces a new hollow hyphen (shaped like a horizontal rectangle) at which you can type your next topic.

Here are some pointers for a great outline:

• Press Enter at the end of each topic. This tells Word that you're done typing information for that topic and want to move on to the next topic.
• Pressing Enter creates another topic at the same "level" as the first topic.
• A topic can be a single word, a few words, a complete sentence, or a big paragraph. However, your main topics should be short and descriptive, like in a book's table of contents.
• You can split a topic by putting the toothpick cursor somewhere in its middle and pressing the Enter key.
• To join two topics, put the toothpick cursor at the end of the first topic and press the Delete key. (This method works just like joining two paragraphs in a regular document.)

Remember — you can outline just about anything that requires more than one thought: the plot to a novel, a speech you're giving, a recipe, an itinerary, a product development cycle, and more!