ARCHIVED: In Word 97, what are all of these extra characters and how do I get rid of them?

This content has been archived, and is no longer maintained by Indiana University. Information here may no longer be accurate, and links may no longer be available or reliable.

Word includes a feature that allows you to display characters (such as tab characters, spaces, and carriage returns) that don't appear on the printed page. For example, Word uses arrows to represent tab characters and dots to represent spaces. That way, you can easily see if you added an extra space between words, typed spaces instead of a tab character, and so on.

To enable or disable this feature in Word 97, follow these steps:

From the Tools menu, select Options. Click the View tab.
Under "Nonprinting characters", select the checkboxes of the characters you want to display. To display all nonprinting characters, select the All checkbox instead of selecting each individual checkbox.

There is also an icon in the Word Standard Toolbar, usually on the upper right of the screen, that looks like a paragraph marker. This is an on/off switch for showing all nonprintable characters. If you don't see the icon, from the View menu, choose Toolbar. Make sure there is a check next to Standard. This will allow the Toolbar to be visible.