Microsoft word show hidden characters

Colored underlines. Object anchors. Field codes. You should see one at the end of each paragraph if there is not one, you'll likely find that you have a problem. Ordinarily you should not see one anywhere else. You can select it, copy it, and paste it onto another paragraph to copy and paste formatting though there are other ways to do this as well. You can use a line break to start a new line without starting a new paragraph. A right-angle arrow between two vertical lines represents a text-wrapping break.

This new break type, introduced in Word and intended primarily for Web pages, is used to force subsequent text below an adjacent text-wrapped object. For example, if you have a caption beside a picture and end it with a text-wrapping break, the text following the caption will start below the picture regardless of how long or short the caption is. Another type of break, introduced in Word , is the style separator. In text, a style separator appears as a paragraph mark inside a dotted rectangle.

At high Zoom levels, it can be seen to have the dotted underline indicating Hidden text:. More obvious in their meaning are manual column, page, and section breaks. To delete these, you can simply select them and press the Delete key or you can use Find and Replace.

The examples below show how they appear in Word and earlier; the display is a little different but still recognizable in Word and above. To access the Paragraph dialog:. Word and earlier : Choose Paragraph on the Format menu. Any version: Right-click in a paragraph and choose Paragraph from the context menu not available in all contexts. If you are tidy-minded, for example, you won't want a string of them at the end of a paragraph where your thumbs relaxed on the spacebar while you stopped to think.

This is useful for keeping dates together so you don't end up with September 5, , as well as initials such as J. The characters circled on the Special Characters tab in the screen shot above produce symbols that may be puzzling. As explained in the article on setting tabs , in a well-formatted document you should not see more than one of these in a row.

This is one of the most confusing symbols because it is very difficult to tell, with nonprinting characters displayed, whether you have actually entered a nonbreaking hyphen or a dash. This is the end-of-cell marker. They are used in Word to show the layout of a document. You can see arrows for tabs , dots for spaces, an anchor for an object anchor and so on and you know exactly how the text is built for example where a paragraph starts and where it ends. If you'de like to change something in the text, to add or to remove a paragraph you can do that easily, because you see, what you have to change - to add, to shift or to remove.

Let's display the marks so that we can see some examples of them - and remember - they are really hidden, they do not appear on the paper when you print a document, they are only for our information about the layout of the document. To show them we can use keyboard shortcut or a menu button. We can also change some settings so that the hidden characters are visible in Word documents by default. Let's start with the menu button. To show or to hide formatting marks hit the button with the paragraph symbol on it.

This will show or hide the special characters. The paragraph is broken with a Line Break Hiding the Characters Again Both the keyboard and mouse methods of showing hidden characters act as toggles. Showing Hidden Characters Permanently 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.

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