Google has added another capability to the popular Google docs word processing tool. Google Outline automatically creates an outline from an existing document.
You can turn this capability on under the tools header.
The outliner was already turned on in my account and I was surprised to see an outline appear when I began working on the revision of our textbook.
At present the outliner is mostly a navigation aid for long documents (the document I was working on is 90,000 words in length). So, it is not a tool for sketching out a plan and then working out the details. Instead, it allows you a way to find that segment in chapter 5 you were working on last night. There is certainly some value in this convenience.
I do have to admit the algorithm Google has developed for identifying the structure of a large document is rather clever.
