Learn to see the invisibles

Here’s the first of what I expect will be very many posts with tips on using Microsoft Word (and many of them will be directly useful in other word-processing apps like Google Docs and Apple’s Pages).

Once you have got all the right words and numbers in the right order you still need to make them look neat and tidy on the page/screen. The default option in Word is not to show the formatting marks that would not be printed or displayed if the document were converted to a PDF. These marks show the space and tab characters, page and section breaks and where paragraphs end.

I recommend you toggle the setting to show the formatting marks so that you can fix places where the words, numbers or tables are not displaying in the way you want.

It’s easy to do. On the Home toolbar there is a button with what looks like a backward P on it (the symbol is called a pilcrow). Click that to toggle the formatting marks on and off. If you use Apple Pages the Show/Hide Invisibles is in the View menu (or use the shortcut Shift+Cmd+I).

Toggle the formatting marks on and you will see where there are multiple spaces instead of single spaces and where multiple carriage returns have been used to force a line onto a new page instead of using the page break command and so on.

If you find the formatting marks to be obtrusive when you are actually writing you can turn them off and then turn back on when you want to check the document’s format and layout.

PS. Google Docs does not do this natively. You can install an add-on to do it which is, I think, not great-looking and does not update as you type. If you want to know how to install this send me a message and I’ll explain.