See what are hidden characters in Microsoft Word and how to hide and show them. Simply and fast! More at - Microsoft Word - how to show and to hide invisible characters Video Transcript In this video you will learn - What are invisible characters in Word documents - How to show and to hide them Invisible characters in Word are just formatting marks. 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. Formatting characters in Word are marks for.
optional hyphens. space characters. tabs. paragraphs. line breaks. page and section breaks.
object anchors So, what do the formatting marks look like, exactly? 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. The first character is formatting mark for optional hyphen, then the next are: - dots for spaces, - arrows for tab marks, - five paragraph marks, - three manual line breaks, - page break and finally an anchor for the anchor of the clicked image. Now, how to show the hidden characters if they are hidden?
Step 1, Open Finder. This app is a blue, face-shaped icon on your Mac's Dock.Step 2, Click Go. It's in the top-left row of menu items. Doing so invokes a drop-down menu.Step 3, Click Computer. This option is about halfway down the Go drop-down menu.
Because they are hidden by default. 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. But if you want to do this faster, use shortcut ctrl+. (on the keyboard hit keys ctrl+shift+8). An other option is to change Word default settings.
Choose File / Options and under Display there are settings for displaying formatting marks. Changes made here will be default Word settings - from now new created documents will be shown with or without hidden characters, accordingly to options we have changed. If you want to know more about special hidden characters, how to use them effectively to keep maximum control over Word documents and how to avoid problems with the text formatting check out our Ninja courses. Invisible characters microsoft word how to show invisible characters formatting marks.
Formatting marks are a set of symbols that provide a visual representation of specific formatting in a document. Tab characters Display tab characters as arrows. Spaces Display spaces between words as dots. Paragraph marks Display the ends of paragraphs with the paragraph symbol. Hidden text Display a dotted line under text that is formatted as hidden. Optional hyphens Display hyphens that indicate where to divide a word at the end of a line. Optional hyphens are not printed unless a word actually breaks at the end of a line.
When a word breaks at the end of the line, the optional hyphen is printed as a regular hyphen. Object anchors Display object anchors, which indicate that an object is attached to a specific paragraph. Optional breaks Control where a word or phrase breaks if it falls at the end of a line.
If you use Word with an East Asian language, this option prevents the incorrect breaking of text. This option is available only if an East Asian language is enabled for editing text.