This is really useful if you need to see exactly what formatting was used to produce a certain look for some text. It will also tell you the formatting applied to the paragraph and the section. Now just click anywhere in your document or select some text and you can see all the formatting applied including the font, language, effects, etc. In order to reveal formatting in Word, just press SHIFT + F1 and a dialog window will appear docked to the right side of the screen. This is kind of similar to HTML and CSS, if you are familiar with those web protocols.

In addition to viewing paragraph and formatting marks in a Word document, sometimes it’s useful to see what kind of formatting has been applied to text. Now let’s talk about the reveal formatting option in Word. Now click on Display in the left-hand menu and you’ll see a section called Always show these formatting marks on the screen.Īt the bottom of the list, you can also choose to show all formatting marks too if you like. If you want to display any particular formatting mark all the time, you can do that by clicking on File and then Options. The hidden text is underlined with a dotted line and the page break shows up at the bottom. The lines with the arrow pointing to the right are tabs and the single dots are spaces. Now if I click on the button above, I’ll instantly see all the formatting marks in the document. To view paragraph marks in Word, click on the Home tab in the ribbon and then click on the paragraph mark in the Paragraph section.Īs an example, here I have some text in Word with basic formatting: Using the button, you can toggle the display of the marks and it only affects currently opened documents. The latter method will display the formatting marks all the time for all documents. There are two ways to go about showing formatting or paragraph marks in Word: either using the button on the Paragraph ribbon or by going to Word – Options.

Reveal text formatting in word