MS Word and Special Characters

This is a very common occurrence with early MS Word users! -“I started typing but had a lot of trouble getting the letter to look good!” Or, “I got quite frustrated trying to make my document easy to maintain whenever I made changes!” Or, “Why do my MS Word documents look so different when I print them out?”

Do any of these sound familiar? Well, much of this can be caused by not turning on the special characters in MS Word. These special characters show you much of the formatting that Word uses internally to create the look you desire. Without these characters turned on, you will not see why the formatting that you see is created.

There are three main special characters that should be turned on always. These are ‘Tab characters’, ‘Spaces’, and ‘Paragraph marks’. To turn these on, go to ‘File’ (top left of the word window), and select ‘Options’. The when in the Options, select ‘Display’. Then check the boxes for these three special characters under ‘Always show these formatting marks on the screen’. Note that this is in the ‘Display’ section of ‘Options’, and that it states clearly that these are shown only on the screen! This means that these special characters never get printed. They are only shown to you on the screen so you can see what is happening within the MS Word document.

Tab Characters

The tab character (‘->') is used to indent the text or picture from the left. Whenever the tab character is used, the default spacing is 5 characters whenever the Ruler is not used. So, if you use the method of tabs without the Ruler, you will often have to insert many Tab characters to get the format and alignment desired. And with the display of the Tab characters turned off, it becomes quite a bit of a guessing game to format. And with the display of the Tab characters turned on, you will often see a lot of tab characters on the same line!

This is a very inefficient way of using MS Word relative to the use of indentation. The Ruler is the key to indenting efficiently and quickly where to place the tabs. If the Ruler is not turned on, then:

1. Click on the icon just above the ‘Up’ arrow of the slide bar on the right. On the left hand side at the very same horizontal line of the Ruler is a box that shows the control character for what type of indenting you wish to use. The basic ones are Left Tab (‘L’), Center Tab (‘ı’), and Right Tab (‘┘’).

2. To use these and set the tab marks you must first insert a tab character just prior to your text or picture, making sure that the desired tab character in this tab box is the desired one.

3. Then click on the Ruler at the desired spot you want your first indentation to appear. If you have more text or pictures to indent, then just click again on the Ruler at the next desired spot, and so on.

4. If you are using tabs with pictures, and the tab amount is too great, then the picture will appear down below the line you are on. So, if you want two or more pictures to appear on the same line, then you must make sure that the tab spacing is not too great, and that the pictures are not too big as well.

Spaces

When the display of ‘Spaces’ is turned on, there will be a dot in the middle of the line placed as a space character, so in normal text with one space between words, this dot will appear between each word. Note that this dot is not a period, since the period is always placed at the bottom of each line and the space is in the middle. The key advantage of turning this character on is to easily show where there is more than one space, and exactly how many. For instance, some documents have double spaces between paragraphs, or an extra space at the end of many paragraphs, or the text came from the web and there are leading spaces on each paragraph. In all of these cases you can use the ‘Editing’ and ‘Replace’ function of MS Word from the ‘Home’ tab of the Ribbon, and reduce all of these to either just one space or no space at all (not recommended).

Paragraph Marks

Turning on ‘Paragraph marks’ is perhaps the most important of all three. MS Word breaks up your text into paragraphs, which is usually text that is all related to one concept or idea or point. If the paragraph is too long, the reader will often loose focus and thus reduces attention in grasping the meaning. So, an MS Word document is almost always a set of paragraphs. And each paragraph has its own properties, which can be set and altered in each and every paragraph. This is done by right clicking anywhere inside the paragraph, and a drop down menus appears, showing all the available options. These settings can be different for each paragraph.

There are two main advantages for seeing the paragraph marks:

1. You can easily identify each paragraph so you can make any changes, and with the display turned off you can easily be confused, especially of the line spacing is relatively large, such that the line spacing and paragraph spacing look alike.

2. When crossing over page boundaries, you can address things like keeping titles with the first line of text that immediately follow the title, or inserting page breaks that persist always, even after adding text that could easily add more lines of text, and throw off when the next page starts. For example, some users simply insert enough paragraphs (whether these paragraphs marks are seen or not) to force the text to the next page, but when lines of text are removed or added, the break will often look very different than what was expected!

The practice of using many paragraph marks or many tabs in a row is not a good practice in general, especially when using many paragraph marks to do your line spacing. Let MS Word do the work for you, so should instruct MS Word whenever you want a new page, or when setting tabs, and these will always work, even after adding text. Of course, with Tabs, when adding or deleting text, you may have to add or delete Tab marks in the Ruler also in order to adjust to the added text.

In conclusion, when you turn on these special characters on (and always leave them on too!), your frustration level and ease of using MS Word will be greatly improved.