In Microsoft Word you can display otherwise invisible spaces and thus easily recognize double spaces, for example.
That's why you should display spaces, tabs, etc. in Word
Normally, spaces, tabs and other invisible characters are not noticeable to you – otherwise the text will be much more difficult to read. However, sometimes it may be necessary to see exactly where these invisible signs are.
- Detect formatting errors: Too many or too few spaces can disrupt the layout of a document.
- Check tabs and indentations: If your text is indented inconsistently, it may be because you have set tab stops differently.
- Check line breaks: Detecting manual line breaks is also useful if you accidentally insert them and disrupt the flow of the text.
- Make room for corrections: When working on complex documents, consider displaying invisible characters when you need to make precise adjustments.
How to show a space in Word
To display spaces and other non-printing characters, you can navigate via the Paragraph group:
- Open Word: Start the program and open the desired document.
- Enable formatting characters view: Go to the “Start” tab in the menu at the top. There, in the Paragraph group, you'll find a small icon that looks like an upside-down “P” (¶). This symbol stands for the paragraph marks and is also the switch to make all non-printable characters visible. Click on the icon to activate the function.
- Make formatting marks visible: Once you click the icon, all spaces, tabs, and paragraph marks in the document will appear. A space appears as a small dot (·) between words, a tab appears as an arrow (→), and paragraphs are indicated by the ¶ symbol.