Microsoft Word

Tab stops in Word are horizontal markers for keeping your text aligned.

When you press the tab key on your keyboard, it moves the cursor to a tab stop. Tabs can be helpful when used creatively and carefully. Otherwise, tabs can mess up a document quite badly.

Word offers tab stops to help format paragraphs.

That means you can use tab stops independently in paragraphs in a document.

When you want to change the formatting of a document, you can choose to delete tab stops individually, or all at a time. We will show you both ways.

For instance, you may have inherited a document with tab stops sprinkled all over, and want to remove them to format the document to your liking.

Here, we will show you how you to:

• Remove tab stops individually from the horizontal ruler
• Remove tab stops individually or collectively using menus

Let’s begin.

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Word offers rulers for easily positioning text, tables, graphics, and other elements in a document.

If you are using a small screen, hiding the rulers helps to gain some extra screen space. Word allows hiding and showing rulers very easily, just as and when it is necessary.

Word has two rulers, and you may use either the horizontal ruler alone, or the horizontal ruler in conjunction with the vertical ruler:

• Horizontal Ruler—available for Print Layout and Web Layout.
• Vertical Ruler—available for Print Layout only.

Normally, Word does not display any of the rulers by default. You can enable the vertical ruler from the options menu, and control their visibility from the ribbon.

We will show you how to:

• Show and hide the horizontal ruler
• Enable the vertical ruler and show both rulers
• Show and hide both rulers simultaneously

Let’s start.

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Sometimes it is necessary to add images in a Word document to display several points concisely. Adding arrows with different shapes, sizes, and directions pointing to the specific point in the image serves to further emphasize each point.

Word allows you to insert / draw many types of arrows: 

• Keyboard arrows
• Arrows by Unicode
• Arrows as symbols
• Line arrows
• Block, curved, and connector arrows

Depending on your requirement you can use any or all of them in your document. We provide you step-by-step instructions here.

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When you draft a document in Word, your text will flow from one page to the next as you type. If you delete text in one page, the gaps will fill up with text moving in from the next page. Word decides the amount of text a page can hold, and inserts an automatic page break to separate two pages.

Sometimes, you may want to restrict blocks of text to one page, so they look and print the way you want them to.

For this, it is necessary to insert manual page breaks. Microsoft Word has a page break tool that gives you control over where you want one page to end and the next one to begin.

The tool has many kinds of page breaks, and we show you how you can effectively use them in your document.

You may be drafting a new document, for instance, writing a book, and you have just finished a chapter. If you want the next chapter to begin on another page, you must insert a page break after the first page.

Alternately, you may have inherited a document in which you would like to change the layout format, for which you want to insert a page break in between two existing paragraphs.

We explain the two methods, and while doing so, we will also discuss the various types of breaks that Word allows you to insert:

• Insert page break in a new document
• Insert page break in an existing document

Please note, any type of page break present in the document is normally not visible. You must toggle the Show/Hide control for Word to show or hide them. 

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Footnotes and endnotes in a Word document are useful entries for explanations and comments. However, the information may be trivial or even useless in some cases, especially when you have inherited the document from others and need to edit and update the notes.

In such cases, it may make more sense to start afresh after removing all the footnotes and endnotes.

In a large document with many entries, removing the notes individually may be a tedious exercise.

Word allows removing footnotes and endnotes individually, as well as collectively. We will explain all the methods for removing footnotes and endnotes:

• Individually by selecting the reference number
• Individually remove a specific footnote or endnote
• Individually from menus
• Collectively by using Find and Replace

Let us begin.

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When you create forms or a survey with Microsoft Word, there are two ways you can get people to interact with it.

You can either print it and give it to them to read and fill in or you can ask them to read and answer it online.

In both cases, checkboxes are a great help to get feedback from your audience.

When used with a printout, your audience has the option of filling in the checkboxes with a pen or a pencil to add a cross or a tick mark to signify their disagreement or consent.

This type of checkbox is a visual symbol only, non-interactive and non-clickable, useful only when printed.

When online, you can present them with a digital document with functional or clickable checkboxes pre-filled with either a cross or a tick mark, and your audience has to click on the checkbox to toggle its contents to match their answer.

Microsoft Word allows you to insert both types of checkboxes in your document, and we will show you the two methods for inserting.

However, your document may have a long list making it tedious to insert checkboxes individually.

You may want to have a bulleted list with checkboxes acting as the bullets. However, Word allows you to have a bulleted list with only non-interactive checkboxes, but not with interactive checkboxes. Therefore, we will show you how to insert:

• A single non-interactive checkbox
• A bulleted list of non-interactive checkboxes
• Interactive checkbox

Let’s start.

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Many books and academic papers require citing of references, giving explanations, and making comments.

These usually appear at the bottom of a page (footnotes) or at the end of the document (endnotes), with a reference number linking them to a specific location in the main text.

Microsoft Word allows adding footnotes and endnotes easily. An additional advantage in adding them using Word is the note automatically gets a reference number.

Therefore, even if you make changes to your document, Word will automatically move the footnote or the endnote so that it displays in the correct page and position.

You can use two methods to insert a footnote or endnote in a Microsoft Word document:

• Using keyboard shortcuts
• Using menus

We will explain the above processes in three parts:

• Inserting Footnotes
• Inserting Endnotes
• Modifying Footnotes/Endnotes

Simply follow the steps in sequence.

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When writing in Microsoft Word, we place spaces (using the space-bar on the keyboard) between words to make the sentence more readable. When we type a sentence, Word treats a space as a character and uses the space between words to decide where to fold the sentence and continue it on the next line when the sentence gets longer than the line length specified by the page size.

For instance consider the two sentences within a finite boundary defining the line length:

As the length of the first sentence is shorter than the line length, Word is not folding the sentence. However, the second sentence is longer, and Word is folding it using the space between the words Very and Lightly.

For some reason, such as for clarity, we may want Word to retain the two words Very and Lightly on the same line rather than separating them as above. The sentence would then look like:

This requires replacing the regular space present between the words Very and Lightly with a non-breaking space. Such non-breaking spaces are also known as nonbreaking spaces or no-break spaces. Word recognizes non-breaking spaces and treats any two words cojoined by a non-breaking space as a single entity.

We will explain how to let Word insert a non-breaking space in a sentence where it is necessary. You can do this in two ways:

• Using Keyboard Short-Cuts to Introduce Non-Breaking Space
• Using Menus to Introduce Non-Breaking Space

Let’s start.

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If you are writing a scientific paper in MS Word, you are likely to use notations—words or numbers either raised or lowered above the normal writing line, and somewhat smaller in size than the regular text in the document.

You may use superscripts to denote very large numbers in the Scientific Notation, as this makes the number appear more compact. For example, it is possible to write 1,000,000 as 1×10⁶, where 6 is the superscript.

Chemical formulas use subscripts to denote the structures of substances. For example, the chemical formula of water is H₂O, where 2 is the subscript. Scientists also use subscripts to cite references like this: World War_[3].

MS Word allows you to enter characters (text and numbers) in superscript and subscript. There are two ways to do this, and we will explain both:

• Change typed characters to superscript or subscript
• Type in characters in superscript or subscript

Lets begin.

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