Kindle Publishing: Show All MS Word Formatting Marks

MS Word gets kicked around a lot because  many of its formatting codes or marks cause problems in the final output.

The truth is, most of those problems are caused by code that humans put in when trying to manually format the file to make it look as they want it to look... they put in extra spaces or tabs or paragraph breaks.

Some people don't even realize that MS Word writes code just as a computer programmer does... it just does it behind the scenes.

If the user takes full advantage of the "what you see is what you get" feature, and formats by eye, the file may look right and even beautiful on their computer screen... but it is an illusion... underneath, the code is a mess,

It still looks good on the  monitor, because MS Word has hidden the formatting codes.

That's okay if you are just writing a letter... you don't care what the code looks like... but if you want correct code to submit to another program, you must get it right.

The first step is to make the formatting codes visible... a feature that many people do not even realize exists in MS Word.

In this lesson, I'll show you how to "Show All" formatting codes, and clean out those you don't need.

{Note to MS Word 2007 and later Ribbon Menu users, the instructions illustrated on this page below are for MS Word 2003 and earlier.
 
To reach "Show All" formatting codes from the MS Word 2007 and later, Ribbon Menu, click:
 
File | Options |Word Options | Display | Show All Formatting Marks.}
 

The screen shots below will illustrate the following steps in MS Word 2003.

 - Choose  Tools from the  Menu bar at the top of the screen, in MS Word 2003:

 - Choose Options from the Tools Menu

 - Click All in the Formatting options at the middle of the screen.

In the last screen shot, you can see paragraph marks, spaces, tabs, and page breaks.   Some are needed, others should be deleted.

Now that you can see the formatting, you can go through and delete the trash.

Choose [Tools] then [Options]

Choose [All]

Result: Show All MS Word Formatting Marks