The Best Way to Locate the Cause of Formatting Issues in Word

Format control and consistency in a Microsoft Word document can take far more time than most people have or want to give. Formatting issues are one of the most commonly complained about items with Microsoft Word. Part of what makes the software so incredibly flexible also makes it tedious to control and maintain. New formatting is easy to introduce, which often disrupts the integrity of the document formatting.

This post discusses the best way to locate the cause of formatting issues in Microsoft Word so you can more quickly identify and remedy the issue.

The Best Way to Locate the Cause of Formatting Issues in Word

Common formatting issues include additional unwanted spacing, breaks in sections of the information, formatting that is inconsistent, and data that does not seem to allow you to modify it.

Some common examples of when you will be most likely to run into formatting issues in a document are:

Legal documents where line numbers are used
Printing items from web pages
Working with documents that are 10+ pages
Those with lists, headings or are indented
Printing emailed receipts that have images and other objects in them

In this post we will use the example of an emailed receipt because this is a common item people want to print or view and they often have a lot of hidden objects in them making them especially challenging to modify.

For example, in the image below, you can see my cursor, but when the Delete key is clicked absolutely nothing happens. This means there are clearly objects in this document that are preventing me from modifying it that way.

In the image above, even though the cursor is shown and next to content, pressing the Delete key does absolutely nothing.

To see what is going on with the document, you need to show all the paragraph and formatting marks. To toggle all the hidden paragraph and formatting marks on and off:

With the document open, make sure you are on the Home tab of the menu.
Click the ¶ icon in the Paragraph section.

Click on the ¶ symbol in the Paragraph section on the Home tab to toggle all hidden paragraph and formatting symbols off and on.

With the hidden paragraph and formatting symbols enabled, you will see all kinds of characters in the document that you could not see before.

Here's an example of all of the formatting and paragraph marks enabled.

With this information you can better adjust the content. Using our example above, we can see there are numerous hidden formatting objects in the section where we were using the delete key and nothing was happening. This includes a table, so the data is sitting inside a table that we cannot see.

The plus in a box is the symbol for table and means there is a hidden table in the document.

NOTE: You may have to click on an object within the table to see the table object appear.

With all of the symbols for formatting available to you, you are better suited to modify a document. Hidden tables and breaks are two of the most common items that are within a document that people do not realize. Once you can see these items, you can delete or modify them as needed.

The paragraph and hidden formatting objects toggle is something that used to be far more commonly used. While it is not used as often, it can still be helpful when troubleshooting why a document is not behaving how you would expect. This can include extra space that you do not want, breaks between data sections that are not appropriate, formatting inconsistencies within the document and data that does not seem to allow modifications. Luckily, you can use the paragraph and hidden formatting toggle to locate what is causing the issue so you can modify the document as desired.

As always, there are a lot of built-in features in Word that are often overlooked but understanding how these work can save you a lot of time!