Show paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbols



Tips for Formatting Complex Documents using Microsoft Word 2007To troubleshoot formatting problems, and to try to avoid them, here are some tips. Show paragraph marks and other hidden formatting symbolsHow To: in Paragraph section of Hom folder, click ?Set Tab Stops to align textMost fonts now are proportional spaced (i.e. an “l” takes up less space than a “D”) so it can be difficult to line things up using the space bar.How To: in Paragraph section of Home folder, click Tabs, type the number in inches from the rulerUse Keep With Next to keep headings with their contentKeep With Next keeps one paragraph together with the first line of the next paragraph. Any time you hit the Enter key, you create a paragraph (a ? is inserted). Usually, a consent form heading is a paragraph, a blank line is a paragraph, and text ended by hitting the Enter key is a paragraph. If you use blank lines to separate headings from text, use Keep With Next for the heading and the blank line.How To: in Paragraph section of Home folder, click Line and Page breaks folder, and under the Pagination heading, click the Keep With Next check box. (When you show paragraph marks, Keep With Next shows as a square at the left of the paragraph.)Use Page Break to add spaceUsing Page Breaks to control where pages begin and end is is preferable to inserting multiple blank lines near the end of a page. Inserting a Page Break forces the following text to start at the top of a new page.How To: type Ctrl-EnterUsing Page Break Before forces the paragraph itself to always start at the top of a new page.How To: in Paragraph section of Home folder, click Line and Page breaks folder, and under the Pagination heading, click the Page break before check boxPage Break before is useful if you want something like a page with signatures to appear on its own separate page. If you want a section of a document, like the entire Statement of Consent, to always stay together on a page, use Keep With Next on the entire section. Check the formatting and content whenever you copy and paste textReveal formatting in the styles. Look for unprintable symbols and characters.How To: in Styles section of Home folder, click the Style Inspector icon in the bottom of the Styles windown Home folder. For more detail, click the Reveal Formatting window in the Style Inspector window.Troubleshoot section breaksSection breaks can be very tricky, and often cause pages to break in the wrong places. Unlike most formatting in Word, section breaks affect the text before the break, instead of after. The most straightforward way I know of to have the footer on the last page of a document different from the rest, is to insert a Next Page section break just before the last page. Then, you can edit the footer on the last page. If you need to remove a section break, sometimes the header and footer are lost. First, try selectiong “Same as Previous” in the header and footer of the section following the break. Sometimes, you will have to insert an extra page at the end of the document in order to create a footer that follows the section break.How To: Double-click in the header/footer to edit it, then in the Navigation section of the Header/Footer Tools/Design folder, click Link to PreviousYou can customize the status bar to show the section number.How To: Right click the status bar, the shaded line at the very bottom of the Word window, and click SectionPrint to a PDF file and check the formattingPDF files are the closest thing we have for What You See (on the screen) is What You Get (on the printer). Word files are very close. For example, different versions of Word might show the same document a bit differently. Print Preview is a good tool for checking the formatting. Use PDF or Print Preview to check the Page Numbering.Use PDF or Print Preview to check the Header and Footer.When scrolling through a PDF file, it is sometimes helpful to set the “zoom percentage” to 100 or less.Paragraph IndentingIndent moves the entire paragraph.How To: in the Paragraph section of the Home folder, click the Increase Indent icon. Or, type Ctrl-M on keyboard.The Tab key indents just the first line.For Graphics, always check the formatting.Check that pictures and text boxes behave properly with surrounding text.Word allows many options for positioning and formatting graphics. Only some of these options convert well to PDF files in the eIRB. As workarounds, sometimes required by the eIRB for converting misaligned pictures and images to PDF files, you can change the file type of the picture or image. If you do this, make sure all of the text in the document is still visible in the PDF file. How To: Click on the picture or text box, type Ctrl-X or click the Scissors icon on the Clipboard section of the Home folder to remove the graphic from the document to the Clipboard. Then, in the Clipboard section of the Home folder, click the Paste drop-down arrow, click Paste special… and select one of the generic formats. Picture (Windows Metafile) or Microsoft Office Graphic Object should work. Reveal style formattingHow To: Styles, Style Inspector, Reveal formatting in Home folderRecommendationsWhen working on complex documents, it seems to work best to automate the formatting whenever possible. If you manually add spacing, you will be able to get a printout, but as soon as you have to make changes, things will probably go awry. It is helpful to use standard fonts and spacing when possible. Using features like font condense or kern, or exact line spacing, might affect the format of the document. It’s a habit for most of us, but you don’t need to type two spaces at the end of a sentence. One is sufficient.In Word 2007, you can use Auto paragraph spacing, instead of hitting Enter twice to separate paragraphs. Using fields that automatically update when someone opens the document (e.g. today’s date) can be confusing for reviewers. It’s nice to have just one header and one footer for the entire document. If you want to remove the initials line from the last page of a consent form (this is no longer required by the IRB), you will need at least one section break. ................
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