Tag Archives for " tabs "

2 Why hanging indents are beautiful things

Okay, The Guru has a confession to make: I used to be afraid of hanging indents.

This, of course, is silly. Of all the things in the world there are to be afraid of — snakes, heights, public speaking, thermonuclear war, global economic meltdowns — hanging indents are pretty innocuous. But I did, until fairly recently, go through a period where I avoided doing hanging indents because I kept getting confused by them. (More on that later.)

Some of you are asking, “What is a hanging indent?” It’s a style of paragraph indentation that has the first line flush with the left margin but indents all of the subsequent lines in the paragraph, like so:

Word-hanging-indent-citation

(If you had to write term papers in APA Style in college, you recognize the format.)

Now you’re asking, “So what’s so scary about a hanging indent?” and “Why should I care about ’em?” Let me explain.

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When a tab is not just a tab, part 3: Center tabs

Okay, show of hands: How many of you remember being taught how to center text in typing class? (Alright, hands down. Those of you who responded with "Typing class? What's typing class?" have officially made me feel ancient.)

For you youngsters out there, here's how it went down: All of us typing students rolled a sheet of paper through the platen (look it up, kiddies) of the typewriter and spaced over to the center of the page 4.25" from each edge (using the tab key and space bar), calculated how many letters and spaces were in whatever phrase we wanted centered, divided by two, then backspaced from the center point by that many spaces.

Years later, it exhausts me just to describe it.

Fortunately, modern word processors like Microsoft Word make exercises like this obsolete. Oh, sure, you already know how to center text, right? But using center justification centers the text between the left and right margins. But what if you want to center text across another point on the page?

Answer: center tabs.

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9 How to set tabs (without tearing your hair out)

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?

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Paragraph Justification and Line Spacing

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 later).

Our first lesson in paragraph formatting focuses on justification and line spacing. 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:

Justification/Alignment

Justification (some prefer the term "alignment") refers to how the paragraph is aligned horizontally.

  • Is it flush against left margin with a ragged right edge? It's left-justified.
  • The opposite (aligned with the right margin with a ragged left edge)? It's right-justified.
  • Is each line centered between the left and right margins with ragged edges on the left and right? It's centered.
Examples of left, right, center and full justification

Examples of left, right, center and full justification (top to bottom, respectively)

And it's 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).

Using the Ribbon

Paragraph formatting is controlled by the Paragraph section on the Home tab of the Ribbon:

You can control justification/alignment of a paragraph by clicking on the following buttons:

Left-Justify - leaves a ragged right edge to the paragraph (like a typewriter would)

Center - centers the text on each line

Right-Justify - aligns the text even with the right-hand margin

Full-Justify - gives paragraphs an even left and right margin by proportionally spacing the text

Using the Paragraph dialog box

More paragraph formatting commands (including those we'll be talking about below) are contained in the Paragraph dialog box. To open the dialog box, click the launcher (the small arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the Paragraph section of the Home tab of the Ribbon):

That will bring up the Paragraph dialog box. The justification settings are near the top, in a drop-down box:

Line spacing

Setting line spacing is easy, too, and you've got the same options here: Ribbon and keyboard.

Setting line spacing on the Ribbon

There are two places on Microsoft Word's Ribbon that you can adjust line spacing. You can either use the drop-down in the Paragraph section of the Home tab:

... or you can click the dialog launcher arrow in the Paragraph section of the Layout tab (called the Page Layout tab in Word 2010) to bring up the Paragraph dialog box:

Word 2016

Word 365 (online version)

If you choose Multiple (see the area inside the red square above), you can use any positive number for the "at" value (the area inside the blue square above), and Word will adjust the spacing based on the number of lines ("3" would be triple-spacing, for example). If you need to be more precise, choose "Exactly" and use points, centimeters, or inches as your unit of measurement in the "at" box.

Setting line spacing with the keyboard

You speed typists out there can use the following shortcut keys for these standard line spacing options:

Press this ...

... to do this:

CTRL-1

Single spacing

CTRL-2

Double spacing

CTRL-5

1.5 line spacing

Space Before/After Paragraphs

In addition to setting line spacing <em>within</em> a paragraph, you can add extra space between paragraphs. This option comes in especially handy in a couple of situations:

  • In a letter, even though your text may be single-spaced, you can put extra space after each paragraph to avoid having to put two hard returns (pressing the Enter key twice) to start each new paragraph. For example, if your font is sized 12 points and your text is single-spaced, you could insert 12 points of space after each paragraph to leave one extra line's worth of space between paragraphs.
  • You can set space before and after headings to give each section of your document a bit more "breathing room" and create a more aesthetically pleasing layout.

This, by the way, is the feature that's often behind this complaint: "I chose single spacing, but I still see extra spaces between my paragraphs!" If you run into this predicament, you'll soon know how to check (and correct) this setting.

Again, you can access these settings via either the Ribbon or the keyboard. On the Ribbon, you can use the spinner (a field with up and down arrows on the side that enable you to change the value in the field up or down) in the Paragraph section of the Layout tab (called the Page Layout tab in Word 2010 and Word 365).

You can also adjust these values in the same Paragraph dialog box shown above.

That check box for "don't add space between paragraphs of the same style" deserves a special mention. It's handy when you're working with headings (you want space before and after a two-line heading, but not space between the first and second lines separated by a hard return).

Where that check box becomes a bit of a pain in the neck is when it's checked for regular text paragraphs. Don't get frustrated if you reset before/after paragraph spacing and it doesn't seem to "take". Select all of the text that doesn't seem to be behaving properly, then head into the Paragraph dialog box (click the launcher arrow in the lower right-hand corner of the Paragraph section of either the Home or Layout/Page Layout tabs) to make sure this box isn't ticked.

Let's Review

Here's what we've covered in this tutorial:

  • check
    Justifying/aligning text in a paragraph — left, center, right and full justification — using either the Ribbon, the keyboard or the Paragraph dialog box
  • check
    Setting line spacing using the Ribbon or the keyboard
  • check
    Including extra space before and/or after paragraphs
  • check
    Checking the "don't add space between paragraphs of the same style" box to troubleshoot line spacing.

This was kind of a long lesson! Thanks for hanging in there with me.

The next tutorial in this series will cover ...

Paragraph indentation and tab settings. See you then!

5 Reader Question: Underlining trailing spaces

Don’t you just hate it when you want Microsoft Word to do something really simple and obvious, like underline blank spaces, and it just refuses to do it? That’s the dilemma faced by reader who recently wrote me, really frustrated over a signature line:

From time to time, I am inserting a line for a signature block or for some other purpose and after clicking underline or using control u I get nothing but blank space. When I check the font dialog box it shows underline and the font color is black, what is the problem?

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11 When a tab is not just a tab, part 2: right tabs

Ever have a document that needs to have a paragraph like this?

Left and right justified text on the same line - with tables

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:

Left and right justified text on the same line - with table gridlines showing

 

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.

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9 When a tab is not just a tab, part 1: decimal tabs

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:

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3 Indenting paragraphs

Sooner or later, you'll need to start a paragraph somewhere other than the left-hand margin. Or have it not extend all the way to the right margin, or wrap somewhere short of the left margin. That's where paragraph formatting with indentation and tabs comes in.

Indentation

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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