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How to Type Topics in a Word 2013 Outline

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Updated:  
2016-03-26 15:32:12
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From The Book:  
Word 2010 For Dummies
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Outlines in Word 2013 are composed of topics and subtopics. Topics are your main ideas, with subtopics describing the details. You should start your outline by adding the main topics. To do so, just type them out.

You see several topics typed out, each on a line by itself. Each topic, as well as any subtopics, sports a gray circle. The circle acts as a handle for the topic; you can use the circle to expand or collapse the topic as well as move it around.

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  • Press Enter at the end of each topic. This creates another topic at the same level as the first topic.

  • Main topics should be short and descriptive, as in a book’s table of contents.

  • Word automatically selects the Heading 1 style for main-level topics.

  • Use the Enter key to split a topic. For example, to split the topic Pots and Pans, first delete the word and, and then with the insertion pointer placed between the two words, press the Enter key.

  • To join two topics, put the insertion pointer at the end of the first topic and press the Delete key. (This method works just like joining two paragraphs in a regular document.)

  • It doesn’t matter whether you get the order right at first. The beauty of creating your outline with a word processor is that you can rearrange topics as your ideas solidify. Just start writing things down now and concentrate on organization later.

About This Article

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About the book author:

Dan Gookin has been writing about technology for 20 years. He has contributed articles to numerous high-tech magazines and written more than 90 books about personal computing technology, many of them accurate.
He combines his love of writing with his interest in technology to create books that are informative and entertaining, but not boring. Having sold more than 14 million titles translated into more than 30 languages, Dan can attest that his method of crafting computer tomes does seem to work.
Perhaps Dan’s most famous title is the original DOS For Dummies, published in 1991. It became the world’s fastest-selling computer book, at one time moving more copies per week than the New York Times number-one best seller (although, because it’s a reference book, it could not be listed on the NYT best seller list). That book spawned the entire line of For Dummies books, which remains a publishing phenomenon to this day.
Dan’s most recent titles include PCs For Dummies, 9th Edition; Buying a Computer For Dummies, 2005 Edition; Troubleshooting Your PC For Dummies; Dan Gookin’s Naked Windows XP; and Dan Gookin’s Naked Office. He publishes a free weekly computer newsletter, “Weekly Wambooli Salad,” and also maintains the vast and helpful Web site www.wambooli.com.