Because proportional-font characters take up different amounts of space, the text in that font cannot be aligned correctly using spaces. Using tabs will ensure that your text is aligned perfectly and is easy to modify if you change your mind! Show The chief advantage to using tabs rather than spacing is that after the tabs are in your document, you can move or change the tab stops and then the selected text moves or realign. Each of the tab settings that you create or modify are specific to that paragraph. And remember, a new paragraph is created every time you press Enter. That means that you’ll have to select multiple paragraphs and create tabs stops for all of them, or you could create different tab stops for different paragraphs to get that perfect look!
Word documents are set up with default tab stops every 1/2-inch across the document, but you can set your own tab stops anywhere you choose. In fact, there are several different types of tab stops that you can use. Ever wonder what that little button in the upper-left where the rulers intersect does? You can click it and toggle through the tab options! Left-aligned: Begins test at the tab stop (This is the default tab setting).  Right-aligned: Ends the text at the tab stop. Decimal: Center the text over decimal point for a list of numbers. To try this out for yourself, you’ll want the ruler to be visible. Simply click on the View Tab and check the Ruler box in the Show Group. Watch our Word Expert demystify the power of tab stops and perfect alignment! You can even create leaders to help the reader easily scan across the page. Update: 5/10/2017 We had a site visitor (thank you William) recently ask about aligning text to the right of a page. We thought a short video would help users that would like to accomplish what William was requesting. We hope this helps you too.
We've got all sorts of Microsoft Office training available. Check out our free trial to see our many videos and attend a free training webinar taught by an expert. - [Instructor] We are in our long document file from the exercise files folder, and we're going to jump to a previous page by pressing Option or Alt, Page Up a couple of times. Now I've placed tabs in this story to separate the numbers from the text, but I can't see the tab characters. Of course you can't, because tabs are invisible, right? But we can see them if we open the Type menu, and choose Show Hidden Characters, way down here at the bottom. Now we see all these little blue characters, like this blue paragraph symbol at the end of each line. And, between the words and the numbers, you see this double angle bracket, and that is a symbol for a tab character. I often like working with these hidden characters turned on, because it shows exactly what's in my text frame, and that's especially true when I'm working with tabs, because I need to know where those tabs are to set them up right. So there's a problem here that I need to fix. The numbers don't line up, and that's because tabs, by default, always go to the nearest tab stop. And tab stops are set up every half inch across the text frame. Now, you might be tempted to come in here and start adding additional tabs, but don't do it. You only want one tab character at a time. Instead, you want to set up your own tab stop. So the first thing we need to do is select all the paragraphs that we want to affect. I'll double click to switch to the type tool, and select those paragraphs. Now, I'm going to zoom in by pressing Command or Control plus a couple of times. We want to make sure we can see the top of the text frame up here. You don't technically need to do that, but I find it's useful to see the top of the text frame when I'm working with tabs, because now, when we go to the Type menu, and choose Tabs, the tab panel automatically snaps to the top of the text frame. It can't do that if I don't see the top of the text frame. Instead it just kind of floats around the page. Now, to add our first tab stop, all you have to do is click in the blank area along the top of this ruler. Then, if you want to move it, just click and drag. You'll notice that as I'm dragging, you can see a black line that indicates exactly where the tab stop is going to be, exactly where those numbers are going to align to. Let's move this over to the right, then I'll let go of the mouse button. Now I'd rather have those numbers line up along their right edges, so let's change the tab stop. While it's selected up here, and you can see it's kind of highlighted in blue, you can go over to the left side of the Tabs panel, and choose one of these other kinds of tab stops. I'm going to click on right align tab stop. And when you do that, it makes the text flush right at that point. So that looks better. So, the only problem right now is that the space is really big. You know, the space from the text to the number. It would be helpful to have some dots in there, something to lead my eye from one side to the other. And of course, the key word there is lead. What we want is a leader. So, once again, with the tab stop still selected, let's click inside the leader field. And you can type any character you want in that field. And it'll repeat it over and over again. In this case, let's just press a dot, or a period, and then just hit return or enter. You can see how those dots actually fill in all the spaces. It's easier to see if I deselect this by clicking over here. By the way, I should point out that you can select a tab just like any other character. Just kind of drag over it. And now you can format it. I'm going to zoom in by pressing Command or Control plus a few more times. And now, I'll go up to my control panel and change it to character formatting mode. Let's make the size a little bit smaller. Maybe ten points. And let's also change the tracking value here to something enormous, like 200 points. I'll click over here, and you can see, that just looks a little bit more elegant. Tabs and tab stops aren't hard, but they do take some getting used to. Take a little time to practice making tab stops in your document. And remember, don't type two tabs in a row. How many tab stops can you identify?Types of tab stops
In Microsoft Word, there are five different tab stop options. To select one of them, click the button shown in the picture below until you get to the one you require. Below are explanations for each type of tab stop. Left - Text is extended to the right of the tab.
What are the 5 types of tab stops?Types of Tab Stops. Left Tab – text is aligned to the left of the tab stop.. Center Tab – text is centered in the middle of the tab stop.. Right Tab – text is aligned to the right of the tab stop.. Decimal Tab – numbers are aligned by their decimal points.. Bar Tab – inserts a vertical line (bar) into a line of text.. What are the 4 types of tab stops?With tab stops, you can line up text to the left, right, center, or to a decimal character.
Can you set multiple tab stops in one setting?In our example, we'll select Right Tab. Click the location on the horizontal ruler where you want your text to appear (it helps to click on the bottom edge of the Ruler). You can add as many tab stops as you want. Place the insertion point in front of the text you want to tab, then press the Tab key.
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