I’m working on a Microsoft Word document that has a horizontal line in it that I need to edit (it’s too long and it sticks out further than the rest of the text). I have tried everything I know of to figure out how they got this line in there (I didn’t author the document), and I’m stumped. It’s not an inserted shape, it’s not a horizontal line from the page borders menu - how did they make this line, and how do I get it out of my document?
Thanks!
Two things spring to mind immediately:
It’s a border put around the paragraph. Place your cursor in the paragraph above the line, then click the little arrow next to the Borders icon in the Paragraph area on the Home tab of the Ribbon. (Oof, that’s obnoxious to write.) This icon might look like the table/cell borders icon when you’re working with tables. On my Paragraph spot, it’s the one on the bottom row, all the way to the right. That should show you if a border is applied to that text or paragraph (and from there, you can also open the Borders and Shading dialog box for more info.) If no borders are applied, check the paragraph below the line too, as it might be that one that the border’s applied to.
It’s an inserted shape, but it’s inserted in the header/footer area. Yeah, it’s weird, but you can open the header or footer and then paste in any graphic you’d like and place it where ever needed (as in a watermark in the middle of the page, for example). When you do this, the graphic remains tied to the header/footer and won’t be selectable when working in the main page area. If it’s pasted in the header/footer, you should be able to select it after opening the header/footer area.
If neither of these work, let us know - I might have more ideas to try.
Ah, it was a border! I kept selecting the area and removing all the borders, but it looks like I missed exactly the right spot! Thanks, Snickers!
Nice! Glad you were able to get it sorted.
For future reference, MS Word allows other ways to insert a variety of horizontal lines into a document.
Just type three hyphens in a row onto a line by itself (that is, press Enter just before and just after), and Word expands that into a full horizontal line across the page. If that isn’t what you wanted, immediately use Undo to change it back to —
There are several variations for making decorative lines. Three equal signs === gets turned into a double horizontal line. Three pound signs ### gets turned into a fancy triple line. There may be other tricks, but I forget what I knew of them. Try *** and +++ for example, and see if something interesting happens.
Once those are in the document, they can be a bitch to get rid of. There must be some easy way that I never figured out. The best I’ve found is to select (highlight with the mouse), starting with the line above it, up through the line after it, and delete that whole block. I never found a way to select just the horizontal line by itself.
One of the very common complaints people have about Word is that it is just too full of tricks, and it does too many things to your document that you didn’t ask it to do. It’s a smarty-pants smart-ass program that always thinks it knows better what you want in your document than you do, only occasionally correctly so.
I think my problem with these documents is that they were created by people who barely know how to use Word, so they used things that got them approximately what they wanted, but when you go back in and try to edit, they haven’t used the proper tools so you can’t easily edit what they’ve done (like using spaces instead of proper tabs, etc.). The other problem with people doing that to documents is that I can’t always figure out what they did. 