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About this lesson
Learn about adding and working with Excel’s outlining tools to quickly hide irrelevant sections of your worksheet.
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Exercise files
Download the ‘before’ and ‘after’ Excel workbooks from the video tutorial and try the lesson yourself.
Outlining.xlsx15.4 KB Outlining - Completed.xlsx
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Quick reference
Topic
Adding and working with Excel’s outlining tools to quickly hide irrelevant sections of your document.
When to use
Outlining tools are fantastic for hiding and showing key sections of your document very quickly. This lets you compress pieces you don’t need in order to focus on the document pieces that you do need to see.
Instructions
Adding Outlining
- Select rows 6:10 and go to Data > Group > Group
- Notice that there is now a compression line at row 11 (the row AFTER your selection)
- Click the – button to hide the rows, and the + button to re-expand them
- Apply outlining to rows 14:18, 20:25 and 27:32 (compression lines on 19,26,33)
Creating nested outlining
- Select rows 13:33, go to Data > Group > Group
- Click the 1 in the top left margin and it collapses to just Gross Revenues and Total Costs
- Click the 3 and it expands all rows
- Click the 2 and it expands the Revenues and Costs section, but not the cost details
Dealing with border issues
- Notice cells B26 and B33 have borders top and bottom, but B19 only has a border on the bottom
- Click the 3 to expand all rows
- B19, B26 and B33 all have borders top and bottom!
- Select B26 and clear the border
- Select B25 and place a bottom border, then B27 and place a top border
- Clear borders from B33
- Select B32 and place a bottom border
- Select B33 and place a bottom border (we want a bottom border when B33 and B34 are showing
- Collapse to level 2 and notice the borders have gone away
Key Takeaway
- Borders just look like they’re between cells. They are actually on the tops and bottoms of specific cells which get hidden/shown when Outlining is used.
- 00:04 Sometimes when we're working with our documents, we wanna compress certain
- 00:08 sections to get them out of the way so that we can focus on more summary level or
- 00:12 more detail level, depending on what our needs are at the time.
- 00:16 For that use, we actually have something called Outlining Tools or
- 00:20 Grouping Tools inside Excel.
- 00:21 I'm gonna show you how those work in this video.
- 00:24 To start this off, what we're gonna do is we're gonna select rows 6 through 11.
- 00:29 And we're gonna go to Group.
- 00:32 And what you'll notice is when we click on that we get a little
- 00:36 thing on the left-hand side here with the- button beside it, and
- 00:40 it shows what rows are actually being grouped together.
- 00:43 When I click that- sign, the section actually collapses.
- 00:47 It hides the individual pieces.
- 00:49 Now this obviously won't print so we can actually now print this out and
- 00:52 show just our gross revenues.
- 00:54 We don't actually have to look at the detail that goes with it.
- 00:58 So let's take a look at how we can actually do this with other things,
- 01:00 maybe salaries.
- 01:02 The key here is you select to the line immediately above the one you want to
- 01:06 show as your subtotal, or as your group one level rather.
- 01:10 So we'll click salaries here and we'll go grab our supplies,
- 01:14 let me just scroll this down a little bit.
- 01:16 There we go, to Supplies.
- 01:19 We'll group that one as well.
- 01:20 You'll notice that I grouped the blank line above Supplies,
- 01:23 that's because when I compress these,
- 01:26 I really want both of these things to show supplies and salaries side by side.
- 01:31 I'll also go and grab my other costs.
- 01:36 And then I'll apply an additional level, where I'll actually go select Other Costs,
- 01:42 and go and select all the way up to the line immediately below Gross Revenues.
- 01:47 And we'll group it here and you'll notice that we now have three grouping levels.
- 01:52 This is really useful to us because at this point if I click 3,
- 01:57 it expands everything.
- 01:59 Okay, so the Revenues have been expanded.
- 02:02 If I click 2, it will collapse the secondary level of grouping here, so
- 02:06 all of my Salary, Supplies, and Other Costs are now collapsed.
- 02:09 And if I click 1, it'll select it right down to Gross Revenues and Total Costs.
- 02:15 Now one of the things that gets a little bit weird in this is dealing with borders,
- 02:19 and you can see that we've got borders in some of these places here where we
- 02:22 probably shouldn't have them.
- 02:23 We don't really need a border on the Total Cost line.
- 02:26 So let's expand everything for a second and see what's going on.
- 02:29 When I collapse Gross Revenue, there's no border on it.
- 02:32 No problem.
- 02:33 This has got a border top and bottom and when I collapse it
- 02:36 It's only got a border on the bottom, that seems somewhat reasonable.
- 02:40 When I collapse Supplies, it has a border on the bottom, but
- 02:43 we still see a border on the top for this one.
- 02:46 That's not really so good.
- 02:48 And likewise, we end up with a bunch of them here.
- 02:52 The reason for this is because if we actually expand all these things again,
- 02:57 the borders that are actually showing here are actually look like they're on the top
- 03:02 and bottom of this cell, which in this case actually when we collapse this,
- 03:06 we can see that there is a border on the bottom but
- 03:08 the border on the top gets hidden.
- 03:10 And that's because this border is actually on the bottom of the cell,
- 03:14 it's not on the top of this cell.
- 03:17 And this is the challenge we have is when we collapse this cell,
- 03:21 it leaves the bottom border showing and when I collapse this one,
- 03:28 because the border is on the bottom of the 79007,
- 03:31 even though I hid row 20 this border doesn't go away.
- 03:35 So this where we need to start messing around with our borders a little bit and
- 03:39 I find the easiest way to do this is to right click, Format Cells, and
- 03:43 actually clear the borders off.
- 03:44 We'll say None, we'll say OK.
- 03:47 What we'll do now is we'll expand this one,
- 03:50 we'll put a border on the bottom of this cell, let's go with the 18.
- 03:54 And we'll come to the cell below and we'll do a border on the top.
- 04:01 Now, when I collapse these,
- 04:04 those borders should hide except that this guy's got borders top and bottom.
- 04:09 So we'll go and we'll clear these borders off.
- 04:11 No border.
- 04:13 Again, we'll come back to this cell.
- 04:14 We'll say border on the bottom.
- 04:17 Come to this cell.
- 04:18 Say border on the top.
- 04:21 Let's try it again, that looks a little bit better.
- 04:26 This cell is not hidden and that's why we can still see the border here.
- 04:30 So, let's go down and deal with this guy here as well.
- 04:33 What happens when we collapse these ones?
- 04:34 Actually those ones look pretty good, and when we collapse this one now,
- 04:38 we've got a border, it looks like top and bottom on these ones.
- 04:43 So, again, we'll come in and
- 04:44 we'll say let's go and clear the borders on these cells.
- 04:49 And now we have to think really carefully where we want this.
- 04:52 I believe I want a border on Other Costs on the bottom, and
- 04:57 I'd like my border below Total Costs here.
- 05:02 And now if we collapse it, it looks like things are working quite nicely for us.
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