About Paragraph Breaks and Tabs In Document

If you glance at the screen or print the document, three paragraphs certainly appear to be there. As far as your readers are concerned, the document does contain three paragraphs. Nevertheless, as far as Word is concerned, this particular document contains only a single paragraph! Clicking the Nonprinting Characters button on this particular document shows nonprinting characters, which reveal that this document contains only a single paragraph, as the following figure shows.

You can press Shift+Enter to insert a soft return (as opposed to a hard return that occurs when you press Enter), end one line, and start another without actually initiating a new paragraph. A newline nonprinting character appears when you turn on nonprinting characters to indicate that a paragraph break has not occurred but only an early line break. Without the nonprinting characters appearing, it looks as though the document will have multiple paragraphs.

You’ll generally never create an entire document without paragraph breaks. If you are typing a section of text that is more than one paragraph, and you want to format that section differently from the rest of the document, one way to do so is to place the text together in one paragraph. You’ll press Shift+Enter to give the lines the look of multiple paragraphs, but Word will see them as being only one. Then, any paragraph formatting you apply to the text—either from the ruler or from the Paragraph formatting dialog box applies to all the text in that section. You won’t have to format more than one paragraph individually.

This multiparagraph trick using Shift+Enter is great to remember for the times when you have a couple or more paragraphs that you may need to alter formatting for later. If, however, you have several paragraphs to format differently from surrounding text, or even a page or more of text, you may be better off creating a new section for that text. You can then easily change the formatting of all the paragraphs in that section without affecting the surrounding text. You’ll find tab stops to be extremely useful in documents. Tab stops enable you to align values consistently across multiple lines. Also, when you use a tab stop, you don’t have to press the spacebar many times to move to the right on a line. Tab stops enable you to start paragraphs with an indented first line.

To set a tab stop, use either the ruler or the Tab dialog box. You can click the Tab selection button on the ruler to select which tab stop you want to place. Every time you click the Tab selection button, the symbol changes to a different kind of tab stop. When you then click anywhere on the ruler, that kind of tab appears on the ruler where you click.

To delete any tab stop, drag it down from the ruler and Word removes the tab stop from that location. To use the Tab dialog box, double-click the ruler at any tab stop or select Format, Paragraph to display the Paragraph dialog box. Click the Tabs tab to display the Tabs page.