Using Word to Manage a WBS

mwt@mssl.ucl.ac.uk

Thursday, 19 July 2001

Word 9 (Office 2000)

• Word has an Outline view which shows a document in a hierarchical form.
• The outline view is also useful for moving items around – just drag the + or – icons.
• The Legal numbering style (), if applied – Use: Format – Bullets and Numbering – etc, automatically numbers the items, and the numbers change if the order is changed. (e.g. 5.2.3 Design Widget becomes 5.2.4 Design Widget).
• When promoting (5.2 Design Widget) or demoting (5.2.3.1 Design Widget), the outliner uses the in-built Heading styles.
• If other styles are given the Outline Level attribute (in the Paragraph format dialog) then they can be displayed as appropriate in the outliner i.e. with appropriate indentation, but not manipulated. This would be useful if the Heading Styles are required elsewhere in the document.
• If the character format of the Heading styles are a distraction, they can be suppressed in the outline view: press the “A/A” button.
• It may be better to change the character format of the Heading styles to achieve the desired formatting. This would be another reason to generate special styles for WBS use. Remember that full editing using the outliner is only possible with the in-built Heading Styles.
• It may be possible to include suitable boxes around each item (Format à Borders and Shading). You probably want to adjust the right indent of each style (not the page margin).
• Connecting lines may be a different matter. Perhaps a macro would be useful here if they are really wanted. In theory additional paragraphs or graphics could be inserted to follow the use of the styles.
• When printing in the outliner, what you see is what you get. This will be different from printing from Normal or Print Layout view.
• You could go for the following approach: Use the outliner to do the initial editing of the WBS, then use a macro to go through the selected text and change each occurrence of the in-built Heading n to a custom-defined WBS Level n (having the appropriate outline level attribute, and therefore the right outline indentation and numbering).
• The obvious thing to want to do next is to export a WBS from Word to Project, then add the task details and dependencies.
• The other obvious thing to want to do is to use Project or Pertmaster to make up the WBS in the first place. Both packages have similar outlining tools, which permit Promote, Demote, Expand and Collapse.