Automatic Outlining

Excel's automatic outlining feature makes outlining a worksheet fairly straightforward. Automatic outlining works best with numerical data organized into groups and sub groups by formulas or functions. The following worksheet, for example, contains monthly financial data for a business, organized into quarterly totals using formulas and the SUM function:

It can be difficult to discern quarterly totals at a glance because these figures are lost in the other data.

To automatically outline this worksheet, click the arrow next to the Group button in the Outline group of the Data Tab.

This will display a menu with two options: Group and Auto Outline. If you click the Auto Outline button, the spreadsheet will be outlined automatically.

Here are the results of Excel's automatic outline:

All of the original data is shown, as well as the outline group indicators (the thick black lines that look like large brackets) and collapse buttons (marked with a minus sign). You can see that the quarters (set of three months) are grouped together and summarized by Quarterly totals. Notice also that the columns Wages, Supplies and Utilities have been grouped under Total Expenses, and that there is an overarching group of all columns under Profit.

To remove the outlining from your worksheet go to Data Tab, click Ungroup, then click Clear Outline.