It ought to be pretty simple, really. Even though Microsoft Word, by default, sets left tabs every half inch (at least in the U.S. version – elsewhere may vary), sometimes you need something different. Even if only for a particular part of your document. So, how on earth do you set tabs in Microsoft Word?
paragraph formatting
You don’t need me to tell you what a paragraph is — it’s a block of text that ends with a “hard return” you insert by pressing the Enter key. In Microsoft Word, paragraph formatting covers such attributes as justification, indentation, line spacing, and what WordPerfect calls “block protect” (called something else by Word, but we’ll get to that in a moment). Some of these instructions will be familiar to anyone who’s worked with a Windows word processor before, but here’s how you can set each of these attributes in Microsoft Word:
If you’ve ever wondered why *this* paragraph looks a little different from *that* one, or couldn’t figure out how to get some text you’ve inserted into a document to just behave, you need some serious formatting diagnostic tools. Fortunately, in Microsoft Word, there are several available to help with both diagnosing and fixing these head-scratchers.
In my recent guest post on Legal Practice Pro, I show you three indispensable tools for not only figuring out what’s wrong, but leading you to precisely the right menu option to fix the problem. The post includes instructions on setting these up so that whenever you encounter a formatting issue, you can know, at a glance, what’s required to fix it.
Click here to read the entire article.
Ever have a document that needs to have a paragraph like this?
I usually accomplish this trick (having left- and right-justified text on the same line) in Microsoft Word with Tables. For me, tables make a lot of alignment issues a lot easier. Here, I’ll turn on the gridlines (on the Table Tools | Layout tab that comes up whenever your cursor is in a table) and show you:
Pretty straightforward if you’re use to Tables in Microsoft Word. The left column is left-justified, and the right column is right-justified. Easy-peasy … if you know how.
But not everyone’s comfortable with Tables in Word. And because there’s always (okay, almost always) more than one way to accomplish the same goal in any Microsoft Office application, here’s another alternative: Right Tabs:
See that right-pointing arrow between the date and the dollar amount (I’ve got Show/Hide turned on so you can see the codes)? That’s a right tab I set up at the 6.5″ mark (on an 8.5″ wide sheet of paper with 1″ margins on both sides, 6.5″ would be the right margin). I typed the date, set up the right tab, and started typing the amount at the right-hand margin.
Let me back up and explain a bit.
With regular tabs, you’re moving the cursor over and beginning your typing at that point. This results in the left edges of your tab stops being aligned (if you’re using tabs to, say, type in columnar data), like so:
See how the left edges of each of those columns lines up? Those are left tabs. And that’s what you get by default when you press the Tab key.
Sometimes, though, you need for the data to line up on the right-hand side:
For this example, I set a left tab at 1.0″ (for the Date of Hire column, since it starts 1″ from the margin) and a right tab at the 3.5″ point (the right-hand edge of the Position Title column) so that data would line up along the right side rather than the left.
Here’s the step-by-step for setting up the tab stops:
1. First, I brought up the Paragraph Format dialog box by clicking on the arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the Paragraph section of the Home tab:
2. Then, I clicked on the Tabs button in the lower left-hand corner of the Paragraph dialog box above to bring up the Tabs dialog box:
3. The above is what the default settings look like. First, I typed 1.0 in the Tab Stop Position field in the upper left, chose Left in the Alignment section in the middle, then clicked the Set button. That set up the left tab for the Date of Hire column.
4. Next, I typed 3.5 into the Tab Stop Position field, chose Right in the Alignment section in the middle (to get a right tab this time instead of left), and clicked the Set button again.
5. Once I set those two tabs, the dialog box looked like this:
Now all that’s left is to type the data into the respective columns: typing the surname first, hitting the Tab key to go to the Hire Date column at the 1-inch mark and typing a date, then hitting the Tab key again to bring the cursor to the 3.5-inch mark to begin typing the Position Title.
You’ll notice, as you start typing in the third column with the right tab, that your letters move to the left to keep the alignment of the column on the right. Don’t freak out — once you press the Return key and begin typing the next line, everything will be fine.
If you find that, once you get further in your document, you need to restore the default tab stops (say, for paragraph indentation), you can go back into the Tabs dialog box and click the Clear All button. This will clear your custom Tabs from that point forward, restoring the document’s default tabs (or allowing you to re-set some other Tab stops as appropriate).
What sort of documents would you use Right Tabs in? Let me know in the comments below.
I have a confession to make: I love the look of fully-justified text. It’s just so darn … neat. It’s got those nice, straight margins on both sides, not that ragged right margin that looks like it could have been typed on a Selectric. It makes a document looks so much more polished.
Except when this happens:
When I first saw this in my draft, I just thought I’d made a typo — inserted a space in the middle of the word “and.” But when I went back to the document, it looked like this on the screen:
“Well, that’s weird,” I thought. “What on earth could be causing that?”
Here’s another area where WordPerfect got it right (and, strangely enough, Microsoft agrees): The scheme by which Word inserts extra space within and between words to achieve the “full justification” is different than the one WordPerfect has used, and (whaddya know) WordPerfect does it better.
But the good news is, you can get WordPerfect’s justification scheme in your Word 2007-2010 document. Here’s how:
- In Word 2007, click the Office Button in the upper left-hand corner of the screen and click the Word Options button at the bottom of the menu.
- In Word 2010, go to the File tab (in the upper left-hand corner, just to the left of the Home tab) and click Options.
- Click on Advanced, then scroll all the way down until you see Compatibility Options. Click the plus sign (+) next to Layout Options to expand it. You will get a huge list of options with check boxes next to them. Find the one that says “Do full justification the way WordPerfect 6.x for Windows does,” then check the box next to that option.
- Click the OK button to save the change.
Your text will shift somewhat (so check your pagination), but the character spacing should be much improved.
This will change the full justification scheme for the current document only. If you want to change this for all future new documents, go to the drop-down at the top of Compatibility Options and choose All New Documents.
In all the years I’ve been using Word, I think this is the first time I’ve seen this crop up. Have you? Let me hear about it in the comments below.
One of the tactics I regularly recommend to users when transferring content from an old WordPerfect document is to use Paste, Special, Unformatted Text instead of just the plain Paste or CNTRL-V commands:
The advantage here is that Paste Special clears out all of the formatting so the newly-pasted text doesn’t mess up your nice Microsoft Word document.
The disadvantage? Well … it clears out all the formatting. And this can be a pain to re-do, particularly if you’ve got a long document with lots of case citations, etc.
What to do? Here are three tricks to keep in your Microsoft Word skills arsenal.
Got a long brief or other document that has lots of headings, subheadings, etc.? You need Styles, baby.
No, not style — Styles.
The Styles function in Word is a handy tool for, among other things, setting up headings for different sections of a document. These styles serve a dual purpose: not only do they help keep document formatting consistent (i.e., all paragraph and subparagraph headings at a particular level, for example, will be consistent through the document), they can help later when you create a Table of Contents, since Word can use these styles to create the levels of your Table of Contents.
There are a couple of different ways to use Styles & Formatting (as the feature is formally known) in your document.
Super easy — here’s how you do left-justify, right-justify, center, and full-justify in Microsoft Word (either with your mouse or your keyboard).
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