Apricot: Little black squares indicate that there are some paragraph settings applied to this paragraph (e.g.Meanings of the different highlight colors used in this screen shot: Here’s what text looks like with the formatting marks turned on: Manual layout was the biggest ‘crud’ issue, and it still is - people used tabs or spaces to center text instead of the centering tool line spaces between paragraphs were controlled by two Enters, not styles two spaces after a period were obvious standard spaces (not non-breaking spaces) were used to separate values and their units of measure soft line breaks line and page breaks and section breaks, etc. It took me a while to get used to viewing a document like that, but boy, did it show me a lot of crud in Word documents, especially those written by others. I didn’t believe him.įast forward only a year or so later, and I was a convert to showing all those formatting marks. He assured me that he always worked that way and that it was a really efficient way to work. I reeled back in horror and asked how on earth he could read the text with all that other stuff messing up his view of it. And all I could see were these horrid little dots between every word, funny backwards P markers at the end of lines, long arrows between step numbers and the first letter of the step text, etc. Most of Word’s power was well and truly hidden from me.Ībout 15 or more years ago (yes, I’ve been using Word a LONG time), I was looking over a work colleague’s shoulder discussing a document he had displayed on his screen.
#Word formatting marks in table free#
If you have any questions, feel free to comment.For the first few years I used Word, I just used it ‘out-of-the-box’ and changed very few settings - like much of the population, I guess. These are pretty much all the ways you can edit formatting or view formatting in a Word document. This is another great way to edit the formatting on a select piece of text that may be causing you trouble. Same goes for Effects, Alignment, Indentation, Spacing, Margins, etc. So let’s say you want to change the font, just click on FONT and it’ll bring up the Font dialog. It’s also worth noting that the blue links in the dialog are clickable. This is really useful if you need to see exactly what formatting was used to produce a certain look for some text. It will also tell you the formatting applied to the paragraph and the section. Now just click anywhere in your document or select some text and you can see all the formatting applied including the font, language, effects, etc. In order to reveal formatting in Word, just press SHIFT + F1 and a dialog window will appear docked to the right side of the screen. This is kind of similar to HTML and CSS, if you are familiar with those web protocols. In addition to viewing paragraph and formatting marks in a Word document, sometimes it’s useful to see what kind of formatting has been applied to text. Now let’s talk about the reveal formatting option in Word. Now click on Display in the left-hand menu and you’ll see a section called Always show these formatting marks on the screen.Īt the bottom of the list, you can also choose to show all formatting marks too if you like. If you want to display any particular formatting mark all the time, you can do that by clicking on File and then Options. The hidden text is underlined with a dotted line and the page break shows up at the bottom. The lines with the arrow pointing to the right are tabs and the single dots are spaces. Now if I click on the button above, I’ll instantly see all the formatting marks in the document. To view paragraph marks in Word, click on the Home tab in the ribbon and then click on the paragraph mark in the Paragraph section.Īs an example, here I have some text in Word with basic formatting: Using the button, you can toggle the display of the marks and it only affects currently opened documents. The latter method will display the formatting marks all the time for all documents. There are two ways to go about showing formatting or paragraph marks in Word: either using the button on the Paragraph ribbon or by going to Word – Options.
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