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?
tabs
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:
We all know what a tab is, right? It’s that key near the upper left-hand corner of the keyboard we press to indent the first line of a paragraph.
Sometimes, though, simply moving the cursor over half an inch isn’t what we want.
Take, for example, something like this:
Those numbers look okay — they seem to line up pretty well. But how did this person get this result? Let’s turn on Show/Hide (that paragraph symbol on the Home tab in the Paragraph section) to see the codes:
Ah, I see. This person used Left Tabs (the default tabs you get when you hit the Tab key) to move the cursor to the left (signified by the left-pointing arrows above), then hit the space bar (the dots above) to get the numbers to line up.
But how well do they really line up? Let’s turn on the gridlines (found on the View tab) to see:
Oooooh. Those numbers (and decimals) don’t line up so well after all. But what else can you do?
Decimal tabs!
Decimal tabs allow you to fix the point on the line at which the decimal will appear. When you hit the Tab key to go to a decimal tab, you start typing the number, and the cursor stays in place while the digits ahead of the decimal point (such as dollars) move leftward. Once you type the decimal, the cursor then moves to the right as you type the digits behind the decimal (such as cents).
It’s probably easier to show you than tell you:
[Note: To view full-screen, click the button in the lower right-hand corner]
This is a basic introduction to decimal tabs for those who (a) didn’t know they existed or (b) were too intimidated to try them. There are more advanced strategies for managing tabs in documents, particularly if you have the Ruler turned on in the View tab like so:
… but that’s a tutorial for another day. This will at least get you started with getting your decimals all lined up!
While Word does some default paragraph formatting for you, you may want to change the formatting to suit a particular need. For example, you may need to double-indent a section of text to quote case law for a brief.
First, let’s talk about basic indentation (which can be done from the Formatting toolbar), then we’ll go over more advanced indentation (like double-indents for quotes).
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