After you’ve written a document in Word do you find the text does not look right? Are there unexpected line breaks or extra-wide spaces between some words?
You need to check your invisibles!
In order to fix the formatting glitches you need to see the invisible characters in your document. You do this by clicking the button in the toolbar that has a backwards P on it (the symbol is called a pilcrow).
Having toggled on the invisibles you will see blue dots for each space character, and symbols showing the tabbed-spaces, line returns, paragraph breaks, page and section breaks, and table cells. Now you can find what’s messing up the format of your document and put it right.
Some common things you might need to fix:
- two or more spaces together (I’ve written before that there should be only one space after a full stophttps://www.garybandy.co.uk/2023/04/25/pro-tip-only.html)
- a line break inside a paragraph that messes with the text justification
- a tab used in the middle of a sentence instead of a space
- multiple paragraph returns used to try to move a paragraph onto the next page (use Shift + Return to insert a page break exactly where you want it instead).
When I write in a word processor I keep the invisibles toggled on, fixing things as I go, and toggle it off at the end to have a quick check of the formatting. You might want to try working that way, too.