MS Word - HELP!

Factual Questions
1

One of the ladies in our office is typing a huge legal document in MS word and she has inserted some horizontal lines by typing ====<enter> - word has converted these to some sort of embedded line object and I can’t see how to delete them now that she has decided they don’t look nice. When I hover the mouse over them, the cursor changes to a vertical resize symbol.

How do I get rid of these accursed things? (short of installing Linux please).

2

To delete, you can go to the space or character directly after the line and hit backspace.

To make the lines stay as ==========, you can re-type them and then after hitting ENTER go to “edit” on the main menu and choose “Undo autoformat” (or just CTRL+Z)

This worked for me in Word 2000, hope this helps.

3

Hmmm, it works that way on this computer but that didn’t seems to work on the one in the office (although I may not have been trying right).

Thanks for your help.

4

It may be a border. Try going to the line and either using the button on the taskbar or format>borders and shading and turning i t off.

Is she an attractive lady? Maybe out of grattitute she’ll let you border.

(if it’t not obvious, say it out loud)

5
      • I’ve had this happen on Word docs before also: I’ve accidentally typed a couple of the same characters and it autoformats them into something it won’t let me get rid of. StarOffice and OpenOffice do it too. The only way I have found to get rid of such formatting is to copy the whole document to Notepad, remove the offending characters and save it as a text file, and then re-copy the text back into a new blank Word doc and re-add whatever formatting I really wanted.
  • If you don’t want to have to re-format the whole document over, you can sometimes just copy & delete the offending section/paragraph of the Word document… but sometimes, the unwanted formatting remains after all the surrounding text has been deleted, and just rises up to right below whatever text remains above it. So then you gotta do the whole thing.
    …
    [RANT]
  • I have always hated this about WP programs. I can have all the autoformatting turned off, and Word still does this sometimes anyway. I had hoped the open-source ones would handle it better, but they do the same f*cking thing. What I really want is, for a view option to force formatting to be shown as characters, like when you look at an HTML source file. That way you could actually see what formatting is present, where it is, and you could manually move or remove it easily if the software couldn’t do so correctly.
    [/RANT]
6

Isn’t that what the Show/Hide Paragraph Marks button on the Standard Toolbar is for? Whenever I have trouble editing in Word, that usually will show me just why my document’s behaving the way it is.

7
      • That shows some of the formatting, but not all of it. The only way to see all of it is to save the document as a web page and view the source, but the problem with doing that is the page content doesn’t appear in [source view] the way it’s formatted, so editing the formatting that way is a pain.
        ~
8

Ok, here’s my guess…

  1. On the bottom left of the Word screen (just above the page numbers) are these small tabs for options for different layout views. Try changing it from Print view to Web, Normal or Outline and see if you can then delete the border.

  2. Search “remove border” from the pinman:

"
Remove a border
Do one of the following:

Remove a border from a picture, a table, or text

Select the text, picture, or table whose border you want to remove.
If you want to remove a border from specific table cells, select the cells, including the end-of-cell mark.

On the Format menu, click Borders and Shading, and then click the Borders tab.
Under Setting, click None.
Tip

If you are removing borders from a complicated table or from several parts of your document, you may want to use the Tables and Borders toolbar.

Remove a border from a page

On the Format menu, click Borders and Shading, and then click the Page Border tab.
Under Setting, click None.
Note To remove the border from only one edge of the document — for example, to remove all but the top border — click the borders you want to remove in the diagram under Preview.
"