Learn to face your formatting demons! Lesson 1: Formatting Marks

1. Formatting
Hell
F Your F
ace ormatting Demons!
Lesson 1 – Meet the Demons
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2. Welcome to Formatting Hell
Have you ever spent a precious hour trying to
get Microsoft Word just to format an important
document correctly?
After trying and trying and trying, you might
start to suspect Word is the devil’s newest
playground. Is this program supposed to be a
tormentor or a tool?!
But help is here – you can exorcise your Word
demons.
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3. Demon Hunting Weapons
The first step to exorcising your Word demons is
to know which demons have possessed your
document.
To hunt them down, turn on formatting
symbols. In Word 2007, the control is in the
Home tab of the ribbon:
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4. Demon Hunting Weapons
Some people find these symbols annoying while
they’re working on a document, but it’s better
to learn to work with them and get used to their
presence.
Demon slayers can use all the help they can get.
Use your secret weapons!
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5. Meet the Demons
Let’s get to know our little tormentors.
Type 1: Dot Demons
Here’s what a Dot Demon looks like in your Word
document (with formatting marks on, of course!):
They’re like chiggers. Here’s one
at extreme magnification:
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6. Meet the Demons
Dot Demons are also called spacing marks; they
show how many spaces you have between words.
There should be 1 space between each word and 2
between sentences.
These guys are helpful in limited numbers, but they
shouldn’t be allowed to pack up! Some people put
in a whole bunch of spaces after a word in order to
create a line break, but that’s never a good idea
because if the text has to be edited, those extra
spaces can be torturous indeed. The more there
are, the worse it is…
just like chiggers.
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7. Meet the Demons
Type 2: Paragraph Poltergeists
Meet the Paragraph Poltergeist. You should already
recognize him from the paragraph mark in your menu
bar that allows you to turn on formatting marks. That
button is a picture of how he looks in your
document:
Here he is at extreme magnification:
Pretty scary, right???
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8. Meet the Demons
This poltergeist is really just a paragraph mark,
or a “hard” enter (made just by hitting the
Enter key). By putting this guy here, you told
Word that you are no longer in the same
paragraph, so Word will set the line
spacing accordingly.
Usually there is more spacing between two
paragraphs than there is between two lines of
the same paragraph… and with this guy as the
enforcer, you can understand why. 8
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9. Meet the Demons
Type 3: Soft-Enter Succubus
Ah, the Soft‐Enter Succubus. She’s really more
mischievous than malicious, but she’ll still cause you
plenty of frustration if you let her.
Here’s how she looks in your document:
And here she is, revealed
in extreme magnification:
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10. Meet the Demons
This is a line break, or a “soft” enter. To get this
pretty little Succubus, you press
Shift and Enter together.
All she does is break a line where
you do that, and she won’t
change the spacing like a
Paragraph Poltergeist will).
The Succubus’s main method of torture
is to break lines where you don’t want them
broken. She can make things look very
strange indeed…
maybe even possessed.
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11. Meet the Demons
Type 4: Tab Trolls
Meet the Tab Troll:
He looks pretty mean when you magnify him…
…but he’s just
grouchy sometimes.
Aren’t we all, really???
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12. Meet the Demons
You’ve tabbed in one time if you see one of
these, twice if two, etc.
While the wise author uses a tab troll at the
beginning of an indented paragraph instead of
5 dot demons, the unsuspecting might be
surprised when they backspace to try to delete
a space or two and instead end up with no
spaces at all!
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13. Meet the Demons
Types 5 & 6: Grid Ghosts & Cell Sprites
If you’re using tables in your
document, you may come
across something like this:
Grid Ghosts and Cell Sprites never appear without one
another, thanks to a partnership
they created in wartime,
so prepare thyself,
slayer, for more than
a simple duel. 13
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14. Meet the Demons
What’s happening here is that the gridlines on
the table are hidden, but the gray lines still
show so you know where the cells break.
The little cell sprite in each cell shows you 2
things – the formatting of the waiting cells
(the example ones are left‐aligned and
centered vertically)
and the end of the cell.
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15. Meet the Demons
Type 7: Keep-with-Next Critters
The little square next to the word
“These” in the example above is the
Keep‐with‐Next Critter.
Here he is at extreme magnification:
Seeing him in your document
means that a formatting feature
called “Keep with next” is turned on for
this sentence. 15
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16. Meet the Demons
That does exactly what it sounds like – it keeps
this sentence with whatever is next.
If you didn’t intend for it to be kept with the next
thing, or if you’ve somehow gotten that setting in
a lot of places in your document, it can be very
troublesome indeed, causing text to flow to the
next page in its effort to forever stay with the
next item. Maybe you received a template from
someone else already possessed with this little
demon. How would you know it was there if you
didn’t have your formatting marks turned on?
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17. Meet the Demons
The Keep‐with‐Next critter can
also be very useful, though, so if
you want to use it, select the
line you want to stay with the
next one, then go into the
paragraph settings, switch into
the second tab (Line and Page
Breaks), and finally check the
box for “Keep with next”. Now
you won’t have any problems
keeping an introductory line
with what it introduces.
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18. Meet the Demons
Type 8: Break Snakes
Break Snakes don’t look so bad, do they?
At least they’re friendly enough to tell you what they
are, right?
Well, not always.
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19. Meet the Demons
Break Snakes can cause many problems. One
is that if you have text preceding the break
that runs to the end of the line, you might not
see these guys hiding out.
It’ll look something like this:
See him? On the far right there? Only his tail
is showing. That’s the thing about snakes –
they like to hide.
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20. Meet the Demons
To see him better and determine which kind of
break snake you have (of 7 possibilities!), you
have to switch views. The best view for break
snake hunting is the draft view. In Word 2007,
you can switch to draft view either with the
icons in the bottom status bar or by going to
the View menu, & then selecting Draft.
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21. Meet the Demons
There are 7 kinds of Break Snakes,
4 of which are of the Section Break type.
These last are the most troublesome. A
Section Break Snake can cause you to lose
your headings, footers, page numbering,
and even your page margins if he’s in a
sneaky mood.
And snakes are often in a sneaky mood!
Section breaks can be very useful, too, for
exactly the same reason, though. For
example, if you need to insert a landscape
picture into an otherwise portrait‐oriented
document, a section break before and
after the picture will allow you to make
just that page landscape‐oriented. Neat,
right?
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22. Summary
Alright, demon slayer – you know your foes.
Remember the first step to conquering them is
to see them, so turn on your formatting marks
when you’re formatting!
(That just makes sense, doesn’t it?)
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23. Credits
Much gratitude to all the Creative Commons artists
and projects on the web.
(Devil) http://sketchory.com/s/vs7j6j6bbw98
(Sword) http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sword_mirror.jpg
(Dot Demon) http://sketchory.com/s/h3m4uw297irh
(Paragraph Poltergeist) http://sketchory.com/s/z1rky56mb0ku
(Soft‐Enter Succubus) http://sketchory.com/s/wy140z9s3cyq
(Tab Troll) http://sketchory.com/s/e3xdmm289nv6
(Cell Sprite) http://sketchory.com/s/6c7qe12z06wl
(Keep‐with‐Next Critter) http://sketchory.com/s/rtb9t0yg07en
(Page Break Snake) http://sketchory.com/s/vjg9hlx21xn4
(Section Break Snake) http://sketchory.com/s/jq1mbikueeuu
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24. Resources
Visit e‐eloquence.com for more help.
Other resources:
The Word MVP Site http://word.mvps.org/FAQS/Formatting/NonPrintChars.htm
Official MS Word Support Site http://support.microsoft.com/kb/901125
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