- [Instructor] In a document like this,
where there seems to be one long flow of continuous text,
it can be difficult to understand
where one paragraph ends and another begins.
And there are other features in a document
that you'll use later that are basically invisible,
unless you know what you're looking for.
So Word offers a feature called non-printing characters
that will label these
otherwise invisible parts of a document.
To get to this, we'll go to the home ribbon,
and then I'm looking for this button right here.
I can click that to show or hide my non-printing characters.
So when I turn that on,
I get a bunch of strange symbols on my document.
Now, so far in this document,
there are only two types of non-printing characters.
But they're going to make it so much easier
for me to format my paragraphs.
Now, this symbol right here shows me when a paragraph ends.
Basically where the writer hit the return key
to start a new line or a new paragraph.
And I can see it there at the end
of each paragraph in my document.
So despite this being a continuous flow of text,
I can clearly see where one paragraph ends
and the next begins.
So if I place my cursor
inside of this paragraph, for example,
and maybe I want to indent this paragraph,
now it's much easier to see
what will be affected before I do it.
Everything after this paragraph break
and before this paragraph break will be effected.
So let's actually do it.
My cursor's there in that paragraph,
I'll click the indent button in the home ribbon.
And there it is, that paragraph was indented as expected.
Now the other non-printing characters
we see here are spaces.
And that's just this tiny little dot in between words.
This shows every time the writer
hit the space bar to make a space.
And I'll show you where this can be really helpful,
but first I'm going to turn the non-printing characters off
by clicking that button in the home ribbon again.
One thing that we'll see in another video
is the grammar check feature.
If you ever see a double blue underline
under something like this,
that's the grammar checking feature
telling you that there is a grammatical mistake here.
But I'm looking at this and I can't see any problem
with the grammar on this sentence.
Well, if we turn on the non-printing characters again,
now I can see the problem.
I can see there are actually
two spaces in between those words.
And it's really easy to fix.
I can just place my cursor there,
hit the delete key to remove one of those spaces.
So I find the non-printing characters are essential
even for the most basic paragraph alignment,
and they even help with spot checking.
And we'll definitely want to use them
in other videos that cover paragraph formatting tools.