That said, this is how you can get rid of any paragraph markers and other hidden formatting symbols that are showing up within your document when they are not supposed to. In the same way, you can choose to show other hidden symbols in your Word documents.īecause the Ctrl + Shift + 8 shortcut is so easy to learn and use, I don’t recommend turning on your paragraph symbols or other hidden symbols using the Display tab in the Word Options dialog box. If you have the paragraph symbol selected in this dialog box, it means that they will display in all of your Word documents. In other words, with the Paragraph Symbol selected in the Word Options dialog box, the Show/Hide ¶ command will not work for you for getting rid of these formatting symbols. Click Options at the bottom of the File tab.If spaces are instead of a tab to format the text, you'll see the space characters, mentioned above.If using the Show/Hide ¶ command did not work for you, then you will need to unselect the paragraph symbol in the Word Options dialog box to get rid of your paragraph symbols. If there are multiple tabs, you'll have multiple arrows. TabĪny tab in a document will be represented by an arrow pointing to the right ( tab marker), as shown in the picture. The picture to the left is an example of a single space between the 'A' and 'B' characters. These marks help with identifying two spaces instead of one and a tab created using spaces instead of a tab. The space character is the most common formatting marks and is represented as a single dot in place of each space in a document. If you want to drop down a line, but not end a paragraph, press Shift+ Enter to create a line break in the paragraph. The paragraph continues until Enter is pressed again. By default, when pressing the Enter, Microsoft Word and most other programs create a new paragraph. The paragraph mark or pilcrow follows any new paragraph in a document. To delete pagination breaks, move your cursor in front of the page break mark and press the Del. There is also a column and section break. Below, is a picture and an example of a page break mark. Pagination breaksĪ page break that is inserted manually into the document is shown when formatting marks are enabled. The same symbol is found on the Enter key on many computer keyboards. The image to the left shows that the line break resembles a symbol of an arrow pointing down and to the left. Line breaksĪ line break is a break in the current line of text that doesn't create a new paragraph and is often done using the shortcut Shift+ Enter. For information on what the formatting symbols represent, check out this page: What do all those funny marks, like the dots between the words in my document, and the square bullets in the left margin, mean (Note: some of the references are to earlier versions of Word, but the explanations are still generally up to date. To create a new field code, press Ctrl+ F9, and to toggle the display of field codes, press Alt+ F9. For example, to display the updated current date in a document, use the field code. And select on the Home ribbon, the Multi-level List with Numbers and headings.
Once all Headings are set to no numbering, select a heading set to heading one.
Field codeĪ field code is a command or code that instructs Microsoft Word to insert special items, such as the current date, current page number, or custom graphics. Sometimes number formatting in a Word document gets corrupt and shows as black box, here is how to fix it: For each Heading, Modify / Numbering / None / OK. These look like a dash with a small line extending down on the right side (shown left). Conditional hyphenĪny hyphen not entered manually entered is shown as a conditional hyphen mark. Types of formatting marksīelow, is a list of the different formatting marks you'll see when enabled with a brief description. Check the View drop-down menu (Microsoft Word 2003 and earlier) or the Home tab (Microsoft Word 2007 and later) for an option to display the formatting marks button. If the formatting marks button is not visible in your toolbar, you can change this setting. The formatting marks feature can also be enabled or disabled by clicking the paragraph symbol in the toolbar, as shown in the picture.
With Microsoft programs that support formatting marks press the Ctrl+ * ( Ctrl+ Shift+ 8) shortcut key to enable and disable formatting marks.