Microsoft Word

How the Document Map works in Microsoft Word

Word's Document Map has a poor reputation. That reputation is justified. Until Word 2002, it was very flaky. I've had Word 2000 crash while displaying the Document Map more times than I can remember.

But it seems to have improved a lot in Word 2002 and Word 2003. And it's useful, so give it a go.

Figure 1: To control the number of levels displayed in Document Map, right-click in spare space in the Document Map and choose your preferred level.

How to invoke Document Map

View > Document Map. You'll see the Document Map on the left of your Word screen.

How to get Document Map to display something useful

To get Document Map to display useful headings, apply the built-in heading styles to the headings in your document.

To do that, use the drop-down Styles menu on the toolbar. Choose Heading 1 for your main headings, Heading 2 for sub-headings and Heading 3 for minor headings. Or, use one of the other ways to apply styles.

How to use the Document Map to move around your document quickly

If you click on a heading in the Document Map, the cursor will jump to that heading. That gives you a really fast way to navigate around your document.

How to use the Document Map to see where you are in a document

If you have a really big document, it's sometimes easy to get "lost". You can see a page of text, but it's hard to know where you are in the document.

Figure 2: Expand or collapse individual headings by clicking on the Plus and Minus signs next to the headings.

Document Map is a good way to solve this problem. As you move around your document, the Document Map will highlight the current heading.

For example, in Figure 1, I can see that the cursor is within the section with the heading "Balloons". In Figure 2, I can see that the cursor is within the section "Sea transport".

How to control the number of levels that Document Map displays

There are two controls available:

1. You can determine how many levels of headings the Document Map displays. Right-click in a blank area of the Document Map, and choose how many levels you want to display. See Figure 1.
2. You can expand or collapse individual headings by clicking on the plus and minus signs next to the headings. See Figure 2.

Figure 3: Hover over the vertical bar to the right of the Document Map and drag to change the width of the Document Map.

How to change the format of the text in the Document Map

Text in the Document Map is shown in style Document Map. Modify the Document Map style to suit your needs. I find that 10pt Tahoma works well.

How to change the width of the Document Map

Hover over the vertical bar separating the Document Map from your text. Drag left or right to suit your needs. See Figure 3.

Bugs Challenges Annoyances

There are several problems with Document Map:

• Document Map doesn't show headings that are in tables. I find this really annoying but it doesn't look like it will get fixed any time soon.
• Document Map won't show numbering on a heading that immediately follows a hard page break. There is a solution to this: stop using Insert > Break > Page Break. Instead, use Format > Paragraph. On the Line and Page Breaks tab, tick "Page Break Before". Or, better, use the "Keep with Next" setting to keep the paragraph on the same page as the next paragraph. Or, better still, format your document using styles that have been modified with an appropriate "Keep with next" setting.
• Sometimes the Document Map decides to display tiny, unreadable type. It's a known bug. The solution is to switch to Outline View and then back again (that is: View > Outline View, View > Print Layout).
• For developers: if you have a document attached to a schema, marked up with XML tags, then the XMLSelectionChange event does not fire when a user clicks on a heading in the Document Map that results in moving the insertion point from one XML tag to another. This is very disappointing, but there's nothing we can do about it.

For the curious or the frustrated: How does Word decide what to display in Document Map?

Word displays paragraphs in Document Map according to the Outline Level of the paragraph. You can change the outline level of an individual paragraph by doing Format > Paragraph and changing the Outline Level. Or, you can use Outline View to change the outline level of a paragraph.

More usefully, the Outline Level can be derived from the style you apply to your text. The built-in heading styles have their Outline Level fixed (Heading 1 has Outline Level 1, Heading 2 has Outline Level 2 and so on). If you create a custom style, you can modify it to have the Outline level you choose.

If your document has text with appropriate Outline Levels, Document Map will use those outline levels. If Word can't find any text with appropriate Outline Levels, it will guess. You can test out this behaviour yourself, to see what kind of a mess Word can make when it guesses<g>. To do that, follow these steps:

1. Turn off Document Map.
2. Create a new Word document.
3. Copy the following text into your document:
   
   A small line of text
   The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.  The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
   Another short line
   The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. jumps over the lazy dog.
   Few words here
   The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
   
4. Turn on Document Map.
5. Click within the bold paragraphs and do Format > Paragraph to inspect the Outline Level.

You can see that Word has guessed that short, bold lines are headings and has changed the Outline Level of the paragraphs.

Since no-one ever wants Word to guess, make sure you apply appropriate styles (which have appropriate Outline Levels) to your text. Then you will be controlling what displays in Document Map.

Acknowledgements: Fellow MVP Klaus Linke worked out the problem with the missing heading numbering in Document Map.