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Word Tips |
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Tabs in Microsoft Word |
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Last week I got a question from a Sandpoint-area reader. She was frustrated trying to get Microsoft Word to set tabs correctly in her documents. Here are a few tips I gave her, which might help a few other long-suffering Word users too.
The first thing to do when you work with tabs is to show the ruler (choose View and make sure there's a checkmark next to Ruler). Then you'll see the little icons in the ruler when you click in a line of text. The default tabs are the little vertical dashes that appear in the gray area below the numbers on the ruler (at .5 inch increments). If you click in the ruler, you set a tab. For example, a left tab looks like a little "L" in the white area. To get rid of a tab you set, you just click and drag it off the ruler. You can also set tabs more precisely and/or change the default tab settings by choosing Format|Tabs. Note that the tabs affect only the paragraph you are in, so if you want to change the tabs for an entire document, you need to choose Edit|Select All (or press Ctrl+A) to select the entire document first. (Note that if you use Word's styles, you can set tabs for all paragraphs using a particular style as well.)
Indents and hanging indents are modified with the little triangles on the left-hand side of the ruler. If you want to create an indent, you drag the top upside-down triangle to the right. To create a hanging indent (for example, to change the distance a bullet is from text) you drag the bottom triangle. (Again, you need to pay attention to where your cursor is...the change will only affect the paragraph you are in unless you highlight the other text you want changed.)
If you are doing something complicated with tabs it can help to "show tabs." Choose Tools|Options and click the View tab. Place a checkmark next to Tab Characters in the non-printing characters section. Then you'll see little arrows that indicate where you have a tab.
For really complicated stuff, it's sometimes actually easier to create a table with no borders. One quickie thing you can do for a complicated group of tabbed items is type them all in with just ONE tab in between the entry. Then when you are done entering text, highlight it and choose Table|Convert Text to Table.
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