Microsoft Word has endured many changes over the years. Depending upon whom you ask, some of the changes have been for the better; others, not so much. Throughout all the variations, however, one factor has remained constant: Microsoft has not always made the best choices in choosing some of the default settings.

For example, you might not agree with Microsoft's decision to put your files in My Documents automatically. As a result, just about everyone can benefit from making some easy tweaks to their copies of Word 2007 (the version that is the focus of this article). By changing the program to work the way you want it to, you'll get more work done with less aggravation.

Reveal the Paragraph Marks

One of the first alterations you might want to make is to turn on the paragraph marks, which signal the end of a paragraph with the "¶" symbol. These symbols do not appear when you print a document, but for several reasons it's helpful to have them in your documents.

First, these marks "contain" the formatting for a paragraph, and you can copy and paste a paragraph symbol to copy one paragraph's attributes to another. Similarly, if you delete the symbol, the paragraph will be joined with the next, and take on its attributes. You might not want this result, so being able to see the paragraph mark may help you avoid deleting it by accident. Finally, some people have the bad habit of using paragraph ends to force lines to break where they want them, which can cause a lot of extra work if you later decide to reformat the document with a different font size or line length.

To turn on the paragraph marks, start with the Office button in the upper left corner of the Word window, and choose the Word Options button at the bottom of the window. This will open the Word Options window, which is where you can make most of the customization changes. (In the rest of this article, we'll simply say "open the Word Options window" rather than repeat the instructions on how to open it.)

Choose Display in the left column menu to show the display options. Check the Paragraph marks check box in the section marked "Always show these formatting marks on the screen". Then choose the OK button to accept the change. Now your paragraph marks will show on the screen as you type. Note that this will also show line breaks (which start a new line but not a new paragraph) with an "8" symbol. You can also use the Display options to turn on other handy formatting characters, such as tab symbols.

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