How to erase paragraph/indentation etc. marks on Microsoft document?

Question

Here's a screencap of what my document looks like: http://i34.tinypic.com/2iid5xx.jpg

The weird (and frankly, annoying) marks just showed up one day and I don't know how to erase them. Any help would be appreciated - thank you.

Answer 1

You have accidently turned on the "Show paragraph (and other hidden characters) function". In Word 2007 this is found in the paragraph group in the ribbon. However, this is clearly Word 2000 or 2003 so I'm afraid you will have to try the various tools bars until you find it as I can only use that version at my work now.

It is a useful thing to remember because this feature can actually be very useful when you can't figure out why things will not format correctly. You will usually find it is because you (or the person you got the document from) have tried to position words with a bunch of spaces (actually not a good idea) and this allows you to see them all as dots.

There are other ways to turn this on and off also. I think you will find it buried in the "view" menu, but it might be easier to find it there in your version of Word.

There is also a combination of key strokes (short cuts) that can turn it on and off. Try Ctrl with shift and *, this works with 2007 and probably your version too as MOST shortcuts are the same. In fact, this combination is probably what you hit by mistake and started all this.