Sometimes, when you look at a document which was created by someone else, you are at a loss as to which characters they have used to format the document. If they are not experienced in using programs like Microsoft Word, they may be prone to common errors; things like using the space bar instead of the tab key and entering two spaces after a full stop. Microsoft Word's Show/Hide feature displays symbols representing these invisible characters. This can help you both to find out what characters someone else has used within a document and to spot errors in your own work.

The Show/Hide button is located in the Paragraph group of the Home tab of the Microsoft Word Ribbon. It is a toggle or switch: click to show invisible characters and click again to hide them.

The most common symbol which is encountered when invisible characters are being shown is a dot which represents a space. A tab is represented by an arrow and is obtained by pressing the Tab key on the keyboard. Then we have a paragraph symbol represents the end of each paragraph which is obtained by pressing carriage return. Many people insert two returns at to end each paragraph which tends to create too much space. Word's Show/Hide feature will confirm where this has been done.

A curved arrow represents a line break which can be obtained by holding down the Shift key while pressing return. Line breaks can also be generated automatically when a piece of text is transferred repeatedly from one environment to another; for example, when an e-mail is forwarded from person to person.

Whenever non-printing characters are being displayed, any page breaks, column breaks and section breaks are also indicated. A page break is indicated by the words "Page Break" preceded and followed by a dotted line and section and column breaks are indicated in a similar way.

The Show/Hide facility will not do anything to clean up documents but it's a very useful starting point to tell you what's wrong with a document that does not look right or prints in a strange way. Using this facility you can deduce what needs to be changed. To actually clean up a document that has errors, you normally use the Replace command which is found in the Editing section of the Home tab of the Word Ribbon.