I have a BAR TAB!!

Image via Wikipedia

Yup! And I’ve been meaning to talk to you about it. As you know, tabs control the flow of text in your Word document when you use the Tab key on your computer keyboard. You can set Left, Right, Center, and Decimal tab stops to control your text placement. However, the Bar tab doesn’t control text placement. It does help you to quickly display a vertical bar, which can be used to visually define columns. Kind of nice when you don’t want to bother with creating a table.

In the following example (click image to expand), I’ve set up a series of names and addresses which are formatted with custom Left Tabs (Custom Left Tabs show on the ruler as a L ).

I want to quickly create vertical bar between the columns without creating a table which I would have to spend time removing borders that I didn’t want. So, I’ll use the following steps to create my Bar Tabs.

- Display the ruler for your document, if necessary

- Select the paragraphs that will receive the custom tab formatting

- Confirm that the tab selector shows the Bar Tab (The tab selector is located at the left end of the ruler)

- After confirming that you can see the Bar Tab, simply click on the ruler where you want the vertical bar to appear

- The result? Quickly defined column bars.

Now, about your other bar tab . . .

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