[Upbeat music]
What do you need to know to easily work with tabs in Microsoft Word? Hi,
I'm Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro.
I'm also a Microsoft Certified Trainer and Certified Word Expert.
In this training,
we'll look at your choices for creating tabs in Microsoft Word and explore the
best ways to edit or delete tabs.
If your default in Microsoft Word is to work in inches,
then the standard is that a new document in Word has left aligned tabs set every
half an inch. This means that every time you press the TAB key,
your cursor will move to the right another half an inch.
So if I press tab here, tab tab,
I'm moving to the right a half an inch.
To make it much easier for you to work with tabs,
whether you're setting them or simply working with these defaults.
One of the things that you want to do is to enable the ruler.
This isn't set up by default,
so we do that from the View tab and then select Ruler.
This is a good option to enable when you first open up Word and then the ruler
will be turned on from that point forward.
Not only for this document but for other documents. So here's our ruler,
both our horizontal ruler as well as our vertical ruler.
Our focus will be on this horizontal ruler for our tabs,
but how can we make it even easier to work with tabs?
Here's a Power Tip. We want to enable Show/Hide.
We'll find this in the Home tab and it's in the Paragraph group, Show/Hide.
This will show our paragraph markers and other non-printing formatting symbols
with this enabled.
Now we're able to more easily see that although we don't have any content or
text at this point, we have tabs every half an inch.
That's what we see with these arrows.
My recommendation is that it's a best practice any time you're editing documents
in Word that you keep the Show/Hide option enabled.
Some people feel it's a little bit cluttered but it gives us so much information
that we can't otherwise see. For instance,
if you happen to have colleagues who don't tab but they simply hit the SPACEBAR,
we can't see that without the Show/Hide,
but we certainly can have a lot of frustration formatting that. So the spaces,
by the way, will show up with these dots.
Make sure you keep that Show/Hide enabled. In Microsoft Word,
we'll see five different types of tabs and these can be created in several
different ways. One is through the tab selector,
which you'll see here to the left of the ruler,
and then the other would be through the Paragraph dialog box.
We'll explore both of those. Our first type of tab then is the left tab.
This means that when you hit the TAB key to move to that location,
the text will start at that point and flow to the right.
Now through the selector, if I click on that again, now I have a center tab.
A center tab doesn't mean it has to be centered in the document.
It's simply means that by hitting the TAB key to that location,
the text will flow out from the center. Our third choice is the right tab.
It doesn't mean that you need to have text that's coming from the right hand
margin, but simply by hitting the TAB,
the text would flow from the right to the left.
Our next option is the decimal tab.
This is great if you want to show a column of numbers because when you hit the
decimal point or the period,
then the text will be aligned up to that decimal point.
And then finally we have the bar tab.
Now the bar tab is kind of a funny name perhaps,
but it actually doesn't work quite the same way.
It's really more of a visual because what happens with the bar tab is it simply
places a vertical bar at the point of the tab,
and so we'll pair it with other tabs because all it creates is a visual.
Now in the tab selector, we also have two other options,
first-line indent and right intent. However, in this training,
we're just going to focus on the tab settings. Let's create an example.
Many times in our documents,
these default left align tabs simply don't give us the flexibility that we want.
And so this is where we can create our own custom tabs.
For this example, I want to have three columns.
One will be a left align tab, then a centered tab,
and then also a decimal tab to create your customized tabs.
Make sure that you're in the location where you want to begin using those tabs.
For my first tab,
I want this to be left aligned and so in my tab selector I don't need to make
any changes. The default is for it to be left tab and I'll move to the ruler.
Simply move to half an inch and click.
Notice then that I have a left align tab at this location.
Next we'll create a center tab.
And for this one I'll put that at three inches.
Now I always have the flexibility later to change this if my content needs a
little bit of an adjustment or I find that those locations don't work as well.
And finally I want to create a decimal tab.
Now I could do this through the ruler,
but you always have the option of going through the Paragraph dialog box if you
want to be a little bit more accurate or if you prefer not using the ruler.
For this in the Home tab,
we moved to the Paragraph group and click on the dialog launcher.
That is a little arrow in the corner of this group from this dialog box.
Then in the bottom left hand corner, choose Tabs.
You'll see the tabs that we've already created,
but these could have been built right from scratch through this dialog box.
Now my third tab,
then I want that to be at five inches and I'd like that to be a decimal tab,
so I put in the measurement type of tab and whether or not I want it to have a
leader that is text or content that proceeds it.
We'll look at this in more detail later. Now, just a couple other options here.
In this case, I want to set this tab,
but I could Clear an existing tab or Clear All of them.
And this only applies to your current location in a document or what you have
selected at the time that you come in to this location. So I'll choose Set.
OK. And let's look at the ruler.
So in this ruler there's my left align tab, center,
and my decimal. Let's start. So first I'll hit TAB,
and then my heading, TAB again
and we'll simply build the heading for this simple list.
And then finally the last column, and I'll hit ENTER.
A couple things to know about hitting ENTER.
The tab formatting is stored in the paragraph mark.
That is, when we hit ENTER, Word copies the formatting down to the next line.
That's why it's really helpful to pay attention to not only what is displayed on
the ruler, but where you're located in the document.
So each one of these lines will have those same tab settings until we change
them or delete them.
Notice how the center tab will work here.
The text is moving from the center of the tab and out.
Here's the decimal point
and I'll put in one more line.
So now I've completed the table, applied some formatting to the headings,
and I also just wanted to mention that, in this particular example,
I've changed the default line spacing to one line and remove the space after
each paragraph.
So this is also a change you can make to all new documents if you'd prefer
different formatting for your Word files.
Now to learn more about how you can easily change the default font and paragraph
formatting in your new documents,
I provided a link to that video training in the description below.
Notice in this list then how easily each column lines up with tab alignment.
Remember when you have columnar data, don't use spaces.
Leverage the tabs. Now,
another Power Tip to keep in mind is that for more extensive layouts create a
table instead which gives you greater flexibility on borders, columns, rows,
and it creates a layout that supports wrapped text in a column.
Note that if you create a tab in a line that already has text,
the tab will only be available for that paragraph or for the selected text.
Let's look at that in more detail.
One of the areas of frustration for many people in working with tabs is trying
to change them, trying to delete them, reposition them,
and it can be really frustrating unless we understand how Word works with
formatting. It's helpful to remember that each paragraph mark,
for instance,
what we see over here on the right hand side stores this paragraph formatting.
Paragraph formatting is tabs, other things like text alignment and more.
And so, if we want to make changes to this content,
we also need to keep in mind what we have highlighted and let's just say that we
want to change the position of some of these tabs. To do that,
I'll select this entire list including the paragraph mark at the bottom below
that. That is, if for instance, I wanted to add a new item here,
I want to make sure that it picks up on that formatting,
and so if we're willing to change tabs,
we need to make sure that we have selected.
Then everything that will take on the new change for this one.
Then I'll move up to my ruler and locate that left tab and drag it to one inch.
Notice how it modified the list.
Now I might actually want to change the tabs simply for one line.
For instance, in my headings here,
it might make more sense to have this be a right aligned tab rather than a
decimal tab. And so, using my tab selector,
simply click,
here's my right aligned tab and let's go ahead and put that there at five and a
quarter inches. And then just for this line that I'm on,
notice I didn't select anything else on the list. Just this line,
I'm going to remove this decimal tab.
Notice how that heading changes. Next we'll look at working with the bar tab.
Now before we begin with a different set of formatting for tabs,
we want to clear the other ones,
and we could come up to the ruler and drag each one of these individually off,
but it might be a little easier for us to go to our dialog box.
And so as we saw before, you can come to the Home tab,
go to the Paragraph group, click on that dialog launcher,
move to Tabs, and here we can then say Clear All.
So all the tabs are cleared. The default tab stops right now,
which are set at half an inch would still be available to us.
Let's choose OK. And now for this next practice,
I want to actually create a bar tab and it could have done that then through the
dialog launcher,
we could also do it through our tab selector.
And let's look at that.
Click until I get the bar tab and let's go ahead and put that at two inches.
Notice what happens. Automatically it gives us that vertical line,
even if I don't have any content, so it will appear here.
Whether or not there's any other content. So for the next part of this,
I still want to be able to put in content that follows that.
So I'll click until I see the L here.
I have my left tab and I'll put that at two and a quarter as before.
These tab settings right now are only stored in this paragraph mark.
Let's look at an example of that bar tab then.
By hitting the TAB key,
I go right past that bar tab and simply move to where I have that left aligned
tab
Another TAB,
and I'll finish the list. So this becomes an application of our bar tab.
Now as I mentioned before,
working with a table for something that's more detailed might make a lot more
sense,
but now at least you can see how you might apply the bar tab if you want to have
a relatively simple list but have some sort of visual vertical divider.
For this next example,
I've cleared the previous tabs and now we'll use the Tabs dialog box to create a
tab with a dot leader.
First I'd like to set up a left align tab and I'll put that at
half an inch. Just confirm
standard tab settings.
I'll set that and then for my next one,
this is going to then be a right align tab and I'll go ahead and set that up at
five inches.
Keeping in mind these can always be adjusted depending upon what you see as an
end result or as your content changes.
This will be a right aligned tab because I want to provide a list of page
numbers and the leader is what comes in beforehand.
In this case, I'll do a dot leader, dot, dot, dot.
But you can see that we could also have dashes or a solid line.
And so at five inches, that will be a right align tab with a dot leader.
I'll set that and OK.
Here I'll use my first tab.
There's my dot leader.
So if you've struggled or created a table of contents where you simply type dot,
dot, dot, dot, dot, dot, dot,
a dot leader is a way for you to be able to solve that and make this much easier
and have everything be lined up as well. So I'll continue with this list.
So now I've completed my list with my tabs,
with my right aligned tab with a dot leader.
Now another Power Tip is that if you're working with long documents,
a big time saver is actually to create a table of contents,
not manually like in this example,
but by leveraging Styles and the Word Table of Contents feature.
Now I'll cover those in a different training video,
but it's good to know that this is a better option than trying to manually type
those all out but that there are other features on Word to make it even easier
for you. And as we saw before,
if I wanted to change the position of either one of these tabs,
we simply would highlight those lines plus the paragraph below it because that's
also storing those settings.
And in this case I simply want to move that right align tab,
bring it in a little bit and I'll bring that into four and a half inches.
So everything that's selected then is impacted by that.
That's one of the things you want to be real careful about is to make sure that
you are changing all of the lines that are storing that information.
Now you've seen how to save time and effort by building your skills to create,
edit and delete tabs in Microsoft Word.
For more tips on being productive with Microsoft Word or to sign up for my tips
newsletter, head to TheSoftwarePro.com/Word.
If this training was helpful,
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This is Dawn Bjork, The Software Pro. Thanks for watching.