Then you’ll see exactly which characters you can choose to have showing all of the time: Note that if the Show All Formatting Marks check box is selected in the Word Options dialog box, it doesn't really matter whether the Hidden Text check box is selected or not (step 3). Once the Preferences window opens, choose “View”: The display options in the Word Options dialog box. That option is available by clicking on Word > Preferences from the menus at the top of the program. To turn off showing those nonprinting characters, press that button again, and you’ll be back to the normal view.įinally, note that you can also control which nonprinting characters show all of the time, whether you’ve toggled this button on or not. In the most recent version of Word, you’ll just select the “Home” tab in the toolbar and then click the giant paragraph sign, which looks sort of like a backward “p.” Turning this view on and off is luckily very simple. Once you know where the issue is, you should look at the hidden formatting of that paragraph and the one immediately following it. (And if you’re not familiar with any of the symbols used for those nonprinting characters, check out the Wikipedia article on it.) Once you have that enabled, you should go to the paragraph in question.
You choose what's easiest for you as you use Word. However, either one of these three methods will work the same as the others. If you're already using Word, you probably have a way that you prefer. So if I couldn’t figure out why my text was doing weird stuff after my last word typed there, it’s probably because of that page break! Good to know. Word 2016 gives you three ways that you can apply formatting to a paragraph.
Whenever you hit keys like Tab, Return, Spacebar, and so on, Word is actually sticking what it calls nonprinting characters in. Seems pretty normal, right? But if I reveal the hidden formatting, here’s what we see: