

If you find you are regularly needing to look at the hidden characters in your document, it is possible to make some or all display permanently. So to hide the characters again, just press Control+Shift+8 or click the Show/Hide button again. The paragraph is broken with a Line Breakīoth the keyboard and mouse methods of showing hidden characters act as toggles. The text isn’t centered, someone has used tabs instead, and there are unnecessary tabs after the text. Here’s a document with an off-center heading and a paragraph with strange text wrapping. Once we can see all these things, it becomes a lot easier to find the culprits causing problems, and remove them. The next page section break at the bottom, is what is pushing text to the next page. The Section Break (Continuous) in the middle of the right-hand column make the two-column setting to become single column then back to two-column. We can now see all the paragraph marks, indents, and several different section breaks that are making our text do strange things. Mouse, simply click the Show/Hide button on the Home tab.įor example, in the document below, I have a few strange things happening – text in columns with strange gaps in the column, and the text has stopped halfway down the page, even though there is more following on the next page.See Understand the Show All markers in WordĪs with most things in Word, you can use either a keyboard shortcut or the mouse to see the hidden formatting characters. Tabs, Section Breaks, Paragraph Marks even Spaces are all exposed by Show All. Show all is the easy way to see all the underlying formatting to help you figure out what’s happening. At some point commonsense prevailed and now ‘Show All’ is on the Home tab, Paragraph section.
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Early versions of Word had a ‘Show All’ option but it was hidden away because Microsoft believed their software was so good, such a tool was not necessary. Microsoft Word was designed to hide all the formatting and technicalities (WYSIWYG). That’s where ‘Show All’ becomes essential. It helps figure out what’s going on when the layout doesn’t behave. If you are working on a Word document with complex formatting, sometimes you need to see the hidden characters and unseen workings. In this way you can be certain you won't inadvertently delete hidden text.Thanks for joining us! You'll get a welcome message in a few moments. The best way to guard against this is to make sure hidden text is always displayed when you are developing or editing your document. This is especially true if you delete larger blocks of text, such as entire paragraphs.

This makes it very easy to delete hidden text without even realizing it. When you turn it off, it doesn't show up at all on your screen. Turning off the display of hidden text presents a danger that you need to be aware of, however. (This is the tool that contains the paragraph symbol it looks like a backwards P and is technically called a pilcrow.) This tool is directly attached to the Show All Formatting Marks option in the Word Options dialog box it toggles the setting of the check box. You can also control the display of hidden text (along with all other non-printing characters) by clicking on the Home tab of the ribbon, in the Paragraph group. (Same caveat about the Show All Formatting Marks check box applies.) The reason is that if the Show All Formatting Marks check box is selected, then all the check boxes that appear just above it (in the "Always Show These Formatting Marks On the Screen" section) are displayed.Īfter hidden text is hidden, you can later display it by following the same steps, but make sure the Hidden Text check box (step 3) is selected.

Note that if the Show All Formatting Marks check box is selected in the Word Options dialog box, it doesn't really matter whether the Hidden Text check box is selected or not (step 3). The display options in the Word Options dialog box.
