How do I edit an outline in Google Sheets?

How do I customize an outline in Google Docs?

With the update to Google Docs that allows us to edit PDF files there's no more excuses for people not to be able to write papers.

Doing an outline at the top is really the only reason I would use Docs, so it's really easy to do. Unfortunately, it seems to be one of those things where it doesn't do what you think it should. In short, it does everything as expected. But what it seems to highlight and make the outline visible is based on where your cursor is rather than what you've actually written. To get what I want, I have to select the whole file. That sucks.

I was reading about this feature and some other users mentioned how they have to go through multiple iterations to find the cursor because it skips around and doesn't show the right place in the document. Not me. I had a very, very good guess on where it was! Now I think I'll be back to Pages.

Is this a bug or are you meant to have to select the whole thing? I can't get anything to stick. I've never had this happen before the update so this behavior isn't normal. You should find that when you add new content, it highlights where the cursor is. The old version would stick any time that happens.

You could either select the whole thing, add pages and then add your content after. Or highlight your whole thing and click on the "Format Pane" and hit the arrow that shows you the selection.

Is there any way to customize what it is highlighting if it does skip around? Right now, I'm just trying to add a single bullet point by clicking in the bottom-left of the screen (which is the cursor place). It keeps highlighting what I just added. But it's not a bullet point. Is there a way to make it be a bullet point? It's not making any sense at all. When I go to format to make it a bullet point. It highlights my paragraph.

Edit: If it helps, the bullet point is actually on the last line and the space is the first letter. It appears to me, though, that it works pretty much like Pages and most, if not all, of the other outlining apps.

How do you edit a table outline in Google Docs?

I've written a couple of articles on this site explaining why you need to plan your outline before writing your book.

Now, even though it doesn't seem obvious, if you're familiar with the format for an outline, you can create one in just about any word processor using tables. If not, check out my previous articles. That's what you want.

Now the fun part. If you use an online version of Microsoft Word that supports outline tables, it's all straightforward. Just click "New Table Outline" and you're done.

In Google Docs (it's in the table section), this is a bit more tricky. I can't find the command to edit outlines as a table. Instead you have to click "insert > table", and then in the little column beside your table, select your option. It sounds very complicated, but here's what's going on.

On a web browser, the options include things like: HTML (table outline). CSS (table outline). PNG (table outline). JPG (table outline). You have to add the ".outline" or ".outline-style" class name to the image. For example, you may have .jpeg-classname. You may know that in Word, the classes are called heading, title, subsubhead, section, etc., so it's logical to use a few generic ones. For example, you could call it outline-title, or outline-subsubheading, etc. Here's what I finally found. I could select outline-image because they share an image icon. So that seemed safe enough.

As always, make your table look professional by putting a border around it and a grid in it. I made my header font color light gray and my subheaders, body, conclusion and footer font color dark gray. When selecting my background color, I chose white. Make your header font size smaller so that you don't use up so much vertical space on the page. Don't worry about margin spacing. In Google Docs, it doesn't matter how big the header rows or the columns are. The whole row or column fills the available space. But the actual table doesn't occupy any space until you start writing content inside it. There are no lines to align to, or spacing between cells. No lines at all.