Formatting Tools

Showing whitespace characters

Although it's mentioned multiple times elsewhere on this site, the show / hide formatting marks tool is essential for understanding the underlying structure of a document's formatting. You toggle it by clicking the paragraph symbol in the Paragraph section of the Home ribbon or by using the keyboard shortcut Control + Shift + 8. This allows you to see tabs, spaces, paragraph marks, and other formatting elements that help to expose the structure of the document.

How formatting blocks are defined

Alignment, indentation, and spacing generally apply to a whole paragraph at once, where a paragraph is any length of text terminated by a carriage return. You can see this demonstrated if you place your cursor anywhere within a paragraph and change the indentation by dragging one of the indentation markers on the ruler. You'll see that the whole paragraph will have its indentation changed, even though you haven't selected anything. These three types of formatting can also be applied to inline objects like tables and images, so they behave as a paragraph in that instance. You can place your cursor immediately after the object, before the paragraph marker if you have formatting marks on, and change its indentation and spacing options as you would any other paragraph.

Using the ruler

The ruler is home to the indentation markers and tab stops, both of which are fast and efficient manners of formatting horizontal space in a document. The left and right indentation markers allow for quick modification of a paragraph's indentation settings, including first line indent and hanging indent. Tab stops can be added to denote the length of tabs, which can aid in alignment without the use of tables.

Indentation markers

There are two indentation markers, one for the left indent (figure 1) and one for the right indent (figure 2). The left indent as a whole defines the leftmost point of a paragraph, but it also provides the option to indent the first line differently from the rest of the paragraph. While the right indent is simply a single slider, the left indent is made up of three sections. The bottom rectangle adjusts the location of both the first line and hanging indents. The bottom pointed marker controls the location of the hanging indent, and the top one controls the first line indent. The right indent simply defines the point at which a paragraph will line wrap.

A vector drawing of the left indent marker. It is made up of three parts. The top two are two pentagons shaped such that each could be formed by a rectangle with a triangle affixed to one side. They point at each other in a sort of hourglass fashion. Below the bottom pentagon is a rectangle with the same width as the rest of the marker.

Fig. 1

A vector drawing of the right indent marker. It has the same pentagonal shape pointing up from the bottom half of the ruler as in the left indent, but lacks the top marker and the rectangular marker.

Fig. 2

Tab stops

Tab stops define at what points tabs will align to. On the top of the vertical ruler, there is a button that cycles through the different types of tab stops, as well as the two left indentation items.

The left tab stop is the default, and aligns the left side of the text after the tab to the tab stop.
A center tab stop will center the text after the tab on the location of the tab stop.
The right tab stop aligns the right edge of the text after the tab to the tab stop.
The decimal tab stop is made for aligning numbers with a decimal point such that the decimal point is aligned with the tab stop.
The bar tab stop inserts a visual vertical bar at the location of the tab stop. Because it isn't inline, it likely won't be read by a screen reader, so use this only when the visual information it adds is not necessary for comprehension.

Screenshot of a Word document showing a tab stop defining the left align edge for the text after the tab.

Figure 3: Left tab stop example

Screenshot of a Word document showing a tab stop defining the center of the text after the tab.

Figure 4: Center tab stop example

Screenshot of a Word document showing a tab stop defining the right align edge for the text after the tab.

Figure 5: Right tab stop example

Screenshot of a Word document showing a tab stop defining the alignment of the decimal point for the number after the tab.

Figure 6: Decimal tab stop example

Screenshot of a Word document showing a tab stop defining the location of a visual vertical bar.

Figure 7: Bar tab stop example

Paragraph line spacing

Besides the general line spacing options that we're familiar with because of having to write papers as double spaced, paragraphs also have options to change the space before it starts or after it ends. This can be a replacement for adding extraneous enters to add vertical space. The most basic form of this is opening the line spacing dropdown, located between the alignment and shading options in the Paragraph section of the Home ribbon, and selecting add or remove space before or after paragraph. These options toggle the presence of this extra space, so it will either add a set amount of space or remove the space that exists.

For more nuanced control of these options, open the Paragraph Settings by clicking on the button in the bottom right corner of the Paragraph section. The relevant settings are on the Indents and Spacing tab of this menu. The Indentation section allows for precise manipulation of the paragraph's indentation options that can be coarsely adjusted on the ruler. The Spacing section allows for precise manipulation of the paragraph's spacing, both before and after the paragraph, as well as precise line spacing. You can simply modify the values in the Before and After boxes to meet the needs of the document.

This type of formatting is preferred to adding newlines because it reduces the amount of unnecessary whitespace characters.

External resources

Microsoft - Using the Ruler in Word