How do I get rid of something on Word?

Question

Okay. I have no clue what it's called (it reminds me of a musical note) but it's to the right of the 'Document Map' button and to the left of the 100% drop down thing. It really bothers me when i'm trying to type and when I press it to 'hide' it you can't see what i'm typing until I press it to 'show' it again. I'm sorry that i'm not good at explaining but help would be much appreciated.

Answer 1

That's the Show/Hide formatting marks button, and your situation is a little strange.  Normally, the button controls the visibility of tab characters, spaces, optional hyphens and paragraph marks (which people normally complain about here).  It normally has no effect on text, however, there is one other thing it controls:  Hidden text.

I suspect the text you're entering has the Hidden attribute, and so is visible only when the Show/Hide button is set.  Try this:

1. Right-click in the text that disappears and select Font.

2. See if the Hidden checkbox under Effects is checked.  

If it is, here's what to do to get rid of it.

1.Click in an affected paragraph.

2.Click on the Format->Styles and Formatting menu item.

3.In the bottom part of the sidebar that pops up, the style for your paragraph should have a bold box around it.

4.Hover the cursor over the style. A listbox arrow should appear. Click it.

5.Select Modify from the list box.

6.Click the Format button and select Font.

7.Uncheck the Hidden checkbox.

8.OK out of everything.

All text in the document with that font style should adjust itself.

Now, if you want to carry this one step further and fix the style on the template your document is based on (probably Normal.dot, but not necessarily), do this:

1.Click the Tools->Organizer menu item.

2.In the left-hand list box, find and click on the style you changed.

3.Click the Copy button between the two list boxes.

4.Click OK.

When you close your document, you may see a warning message asking if you want to save the changes to Normal.dot. This is an anti-virus measure, intended to alert you that something has changed in Normal.dot. In this case, you made the change, so you want to accept it.

That should do it.

Answer 2

ok I know what your talking about, it really doesn't have a name, but it shows the words that are being printed, so when you click show it will show everything that's on the paper, but when you click hide it will only show the things that are going to be printed, I think. I would use another typing program because I don't know how to fix this, you can use http://www.download.com/OpenOffice-org-W...

I've used it and I like it and its FREE! so what's not to like! lol :) hope this helps